An ecological approach to social interaction: theory, methods, and empirical investigations

Date

2018-06-21

Authors

Lemery, Charles Robert

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Abstract

The purpose of this research was to study the genesis of a social interaction as a whole, ecological process. In the currently existing literature there is a distinct absence of theory and methods that can be applied to such a problem. The reason for this appears to be that social interaction has been studied from one of two points of view. One of these stresses the representational, cognitive aspects of social knowing; the other stresses the behavioural aspects of social interaction. Each of these approaches proves to be methodologically abstract, characterized by a strong subject-object dualism such that neither, on its own or in combination with the other, is able adequately to grasp the concrete complexity of objective social interaction. It is argued here that this dualism is the result of the representationalist theory of perception that both approaches hegemonically adopt. Despite its wide acceptance representationalism is highly problematic for epistemology, evolution, general psychology, and the understanding of social interaction in particular. Modern direct realism (Gibson, Leontyev, etc.), on the other hand, provides a parsimonious and coherent alternative to representationalism as a basis for the development of research in social interaction. The present research attempts to incorporate J. J. Gibson's ecological psychology and Leontyev's activity theory into an ecological theory that regards and investigates social interaction as an integrated dynamic process that develops over time as a functional integration of behaviour, perception, and cognition. This ecological theory yields the following hypotheses: 1) People can come directly to know (i.e., learn) information about social interaction if they are given the opportunity to do so. 2) Over time, social interactants' behaviour, perception, and cognition will, as a single process, converge upon certain "Main Events" in the interaction they are learning. These Main Events (social affordances) function to allow collective learning of social coordinations. 3) A referential, abstracting function of cognition will emerge as learning proceeds. Interactants will develop interpretations of the meaning of the interaction; but, regardless of the content of these interpretations, the actual Main Events to which the cognitive content of different percelvers refers will tend to be the same. Support was established for these hypotheses by employing a mlcrogenetlc, Vygotsklan methodology in a series of six replicative investigations. The findings are presented and discussed in relation to the theory, hypotheses, research on social knowing and interaction, and future applications.

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Social interaction

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