Editorial: Current and Future Directions of Socio-Ecological Psychology

Abstract

Socio-ecological psychology "investigates how mind and behavior are shaped in part by their natural and social habitats (social ecology), and how natural and social habitats are in turn shaped partly by mind and behavior" (Oishi, 2014, p. 582). Just as the main goal of cultural psychology is to illuminate how individuals and culture make each other up (Shweder, 1991), the main goal of this approach is to illuminate how individuals and social ecologies define each other. Unlike the complex and often abstract concepts of culture, social ecology includes concrete environments such as physical (e.g., climate, terrain, pathogen), economic (e.g., recession, boom, inequality), political (e.g., dictatorship, democracy, political instability), and interpersonal environments (e.g., small ingroup, transient social networks), among others (see Fig. 1). In the present issue, we invited five articles that represent a socio-ecological approach in five distinct areas of psychology: clinical/abnormal psychology (Oka, 2014), evolutionary social psychology (Murray,

Out of place: Socioeconomic status, use of public space, and belonging in higher education.

“…The present work dovetails nicely with work demonstrating the importance of the physical context on individuals' success and well-being (Oishi & Graham, 2010;Oishi & Hoffman, 2014;Oishi, Saeki, & Axt, 2015; see also Bonam, Bergsieker, & Eberhardt, 2016). Previous work has shown that physical objects can provide cues as to who belongs in a domain and who does not.…”