Ecological Perspectives

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Ecology originated as a branch science of biology that examined the relationship of an organism to its environment. Beyond this origin, the ecology metaphor has attracted the attention of scholars from many disciplines outside the natural sciences. Influenced by the works of biologists on the interaction of organisms within their environments, social scientists started to engage themselves in examining human groups in a similar way. Ecological perspectives address the importance of environments in the broadest sense.

The present entry focuses on works of the two most influential scholars who contributed to the conceptualizations of “ecology.” Urie Bronfenbrenner and James Jerome Gibson made great contributions in psychology and beyond. Bronfenbrenner and Gibson were hardly the first people to point out the importance of environments in social sceince. However, both Bronfenbrenner and Gibson are considered to be pioneers in ecological research, placing “ecology” at the center of their academic endeavors. The concepts of “bioecological systems” by Bronfenbrenner and “affordance” by Gibson are discussed below to highlight the major theoretical tenets found in ecological research.

In The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design, Bronfenbrenner proposes a conceptual framework for child development that focuses on the interrelationships between various environmental settings.

Affordances, coined by Gibson, are generally defined as the interactive possibilities of a particular object or environment. His interest in the optic perception of visually impaired people led Gibson to develop the notion of affordances. Gibson challenged the traditional view on vision: namely, the eye serves as a camera to capture an image and the image is transmitted to the brain. To a visually impaired person, this analogy of the eye as a camera would not work. Visually impaired people's ability to navigate is based on detecting environmental structures as revealed over time along a habitually traveled route. These distinct types of information specifying particular route properties are variable and ubiquitous, and are embedded in the surrounding environment. He illustrates the nature of affordances by listing many examples: an apple affords eating; a cliff affords falling off; a sidewalk affords locomotion. Gibson developed the notion of affordances in his more general ecological approach to perception, emphasizing that [Page 330]affordances are specified by information available in ambient stimulation—the array of light, sound, and other forms of energy surrounding every organism—and thus can potentially be perceived if the organism is sensitive to this information. However, affordances are objective properties of the environment in the sense that they exist whether or not they are perceived. Thus, a situation can be described as a complex set of affordances for an individual, some of which will be perceived by the individual and some of which will not.

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