Toward a radically embodied, embedded social psychology

摘要

A roadmap toward a more radically embodied social psychology is offered. The perspective embeds embodied minds in aniche: A physical and social environment with action possibilities ("affordances") that humans are equipped to utilize. Atthe heart of this embedded perspective is the suggestion that the methods and conceptualizations of integrating the body intosocial psychology must be inherently more relational, approaching meaning as emerging from the relation of the individual toits environment, as instantiated in the affordance construct (Gibson, 1977, 1979). Moreover, a more radical embodimentalso demands that scientists reexamine the environment, in a way that goes beyond the truism that the environmentinfluences the individual, to understand how meaning's emergence from individual-environment interactions obeysuniversal dynamical principles. In addition, the perspective illustrates that embedding an individual within an emergentsocial unit of action, a dyadic relationship or a group, provides new possibilities for perceiving and acting that bothconstrain and extend an individual's way of interacting with the environment.