An Ecological Approach to Psychology

Abstract

Even though the term "ecology" was introduced into scientific discourse in the 1860s, and by century's end much of experimental psychology had embraced an evolutionary perspective, it took more than another half century before proposals for an ecological psychology began to appear. Even so, ecological psychology was marginalized from the mainstream of the discipline, and it remains so today. This disjunction between psychology's embrace of evolutionary theory and its resistance to ecological thinking can be explained, in large part, historically. It was Herbert Spencer's evolutionary framework, that assumes an environment-mind dichotomy, which was embraced by most early psychologists, and its influence remains today. A Darwinian perspective, in contrast, stresses the activity of an organism in the context of the dynamic mutual relations of its econiche. At the heart of Darwinian thinking, and in turn ecological psychology, are dynamic organism-environment relations, functionally meaningful environmental properties, as well as change and variation. An ecological psychology also recognizes that humans, like other living things, adapt to their econiche, in part, by altering it and thereby modifying the econiche's functional properties. The human econiche, in particular, is characterized by functionally significant, socially normative meanings owing to the sociocultural systems that naturally stem from the character of hominid evolution.

Stasis and change: social psychological insights into social-ecological resilience

“…The importance of doing so is underscored when we consider that behavior settings naturally set the scene for the development and continuation of socially normative practices (Heft 2001(Heft , 2003(Heft , 2013, which are basically patterns or behavior considered normal within one's social milieu and which exert a strong influence over individuals to conform. Inevitably, it is through collective patterns of action that many of the human capital dimensions, e.g., psychological and physical health, positive social relations, to community resilience might accrue.…”

“…Ultimately, "the affordances of the http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss1/art39/ environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes for good or ill" (Gibson 1979:127), and they therefore guide action. Rather than involving higher-order cognitive processing, the perception of affordances is considered to occur simply through direct experience with an object in situ (Heft 2003(Heft , 2013. Affordances are analogous to Lewin's concept of valence (McArthur and Baron 1983), the 'pull' of a collection of psychological forces in the life space, expressed dimensionally as negative/unfavorable, i.e., movement away from the object, versus positive/favorable valence, i.e., movement toward the object , but Gibson's articulation more fully describes the nature of affordances, characterizing the worth of the object to the person in a contextually rich and action-centred way.…”

“…We seek to advance this endeavour by returning to the classic literature of Kurt Lewin (1890Lewin ( -1947, a man who http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss1/art39/ pioneered work on social change, especially the resolution of social conflict, and who explicitly brought ecology into psychological theorizing some 70-odd years ago. Despite his efforts, as well as the work of later psychologists (Gibson 1966, Barker 1968, Bronfenbrenner 1979, ecological ideas have not fully or firmly established themselves in mainstream psychological thinking (Oishi and Graham 2010, Heft 2013, Oishi 2014. However, with increasing recognition that many of the earth's SESs are in a state of crisis, it would appear that we are now on the precipice of a renaissance in social-ecological psychological research and practice.…”

Affordances of Historic Urban Landscapes: An Ecological Understanding of Human Interaction with the Past

“…An ecological view of human perception has been developed in the field of ecological psychology to show that humans perceive their surrounding environment in a dynamic and direct way (Heft, 2012(Heft, , 2013Gibson, 1979;Barker, 1968). An ecological approach is a systemic way of thinking that rejects the stimulus-response claim of human perception and holds the mutuality of human-environment relations.…”

“…It states that heritage perception is an ecological process part of a person-environment system where humans perceive their everyday environment 'as a place of functionally meaningful objects and events' (Heft, 2003(Heft, , 2013. My argument proceeds by describing the concept of 'affordances' or possibilities for action in the environment and in humans interplay with tangibles and intangibles (Gibson, 1979).…”