How Do We See and Act in the World?
Meet Four People Who Studied This Question
It’s a short blog this week as it’s my brothers wedding and I am the best man, so I still have a speech to write! Based on a great conversation I had this week I thought I would try and summarise the 4 main early influencers of Ecological Psychology. My current thinking is that Ecological Psychology provides significant value in improving behavioural change initiatives, complimenting the dominance of Cognitive Psychology interventions available. This is the E that Lewin talks about in his equation (see here for my first blog post for newer readers).
Have you ever wondered how we see and act in the world around us? How do we notice things, make choices, and interact with others? How does the world affect us, and how do we affect the world? These are some of the questions that ecological psychology tries to answer. Ecological psychology is a type of psychology that looks at how humans and their environments are connected. It says that we need to pay attention to the situation and what it offers us, not just what is going on in our heads, but what is going on around our heads. In this blog, I will tell you about four people who were very important for ecological psychology: Roger Barker, Egon Brunswik, James Gibson, and Urie Bronfenbrenner.
Roger Barker: How Places and Times Shape Our Behavior
Roger Barker (1903-1990) was an American psychologist who contributed to this new field ecological psychology. He wanted to know how different places and times affect how we feel and act. He came up with the idea of behaviour settings: these are things like a manufacturing floor, a park, a restaurant, or a meeting. They have a specific location, time, and expected behavior for the people who are there. For example, on a manufacturing floor, you have to work at your station, listen to the foreman, and do your work. In a park, you can run around, play games, and have fun. Barker said that behavior settings have their own rules, roles, and goals that influence and limit what we can do there. He spent a lot of time watching people in real places and times, like schools and towns, to see what kinds of behavior settings they had. He also made methods and tools for measuring and showing behavior settings, like the Behavior Setting Survey and the Behavior Milieu Map.
Egon Brunswik: How We Use Clues from the World to Make Judgments
Egon Brunswik (1903-1955) was an Austrian-American psychologist who had a theory called probabilistic functionalism. He said that human perception and action are ways of dealing with an uncertain and changing world. He said that we use many clues from the world to make judgments and decisions based on how likely they are to help us reach our goals. He also made a picture called the lens model to show how we guess the properties of something in the world (like its size, shape, color, etc.) from the clues we get from our senses (like sight, sound, touch, etc.). The lens model shows how something in the world, the clues we get from it, and our judgment about it are related by two functions: one function shows how something in the world makes the clues we get from it, and another function shows how we use the clues we get from it to make a judgment about it. The lens model also shows how good or bad our judgment is depending on how valid and similar the clues are, as well as how well the two functions match.
James Gibson: What the World Offers Us and How We See It Directly
James Gibson (1904-1979) was an American psychologist who had a theory of affordances. These are the things that the world offers us to do with it. For example, a chair offers us to sit on it, a door offers us to open it, and a cliff offers us to fall off it. Gibson said that affordances are real things in the world that we see directly without any need for thinking or guessing. He also had a concept of direct perception, which says that we see the world by picking up information from patterns of light that come from surfaces. These patterns of light tell us about the layout, movement, and affordances of the world. He did not agree with the idea that perception involves making sensations or mental images based on what we already know or expect. He stressed the role of moving around and exploring in perception, as well as studying perception in real-world settings.
Urie Bronfenbrenner: How Different Levels of the Environment Affect Our Development
Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005) was a Russian-American psychologist who made the ecological systems theory. This theory looks at human development as a complex system of relationships affected by many levels of the environment, from close family and school settings to broad cultural values, laws, and customs. He divided the person’s environment into five different systems:
The microsystem is the closest environmental setting that has the person in it, such as family, school, friends, neighborhood, etc. It involves direct interactions between the person and other people or things in the setting.
The mesosystem is the connection between two or more microsystems, such as between family and school, or between school and friends. It involves indirect influences or links between different microsystems that affect the person’s development.
The exosystem is a part of the environment that does not have the person in it but affects one or more of his or her microsystems. For example, a parent’s workplace may affect the family microsystem through work-related stress or income level.
The macrosystem is the outermost layer of the environment that has the general cultural, social, economic, and political contexts in which the person lives. It involves the big values, beliefs, ideas, laws, and customs of a society or a group that shape the person’s development.
The chronosystem is the dimension of time that influences the person’s development. It involves both the historical changes in the environment (such as wars, recessions, technological innovations, etc.) and the life events that happen in the person’s life (such as birth, death, marriage, divorce, etc.).
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory has implications for teaching practice, as it suggests that teachers need to think about not only the individual characteristics of the learners, but also the many contexts and interactions that affect their learning and development.
So what does an ecological lens suggest for organisational change? Here are some insights:
Look beyond individual skills to examine how workplace ecology and "behavior settings" shape performance. Changing the deepest habits often requires changing the environment.
Utilise natural experiments to create representative conditions, not just artificial training workshops. Test how new office layouts, tools, and policies change behaviours.
Leverage affordances - create workplace elements that naturally elicit desired actions without overt direction, e.g. co-location of teams to afford stronger collaborations
Develop initiatives spanning micro to macro levels, considering how team norms, organisational systems, and societal values interact to drive change.
Focus on proximal processes that drive development through sustained, increasingly complex interactions over time, not one-off interventions.
The cognitive perspective remains invaluable, but let's also tap into ecological psychology's wider lens to build environments where people and organisations can thrive sustainably.