Ecological Optics as the Conceptual Basis for the Interpersonal Self and Social Interaction

Abstract

Agency, the ability to negotiate one’s surroundings to bring about changes, is the defining feature of animacy. Because agency is embodied in each individual’s self, inquiry into agency is necessarily an inquiry into selfhood. William James divided selfhood into the self as “I” and the self as “me” with the I self being, in essence, an active agent responsible for thoughts and actions. In Gibson’s ecological paradigm, self plays a central role, being co-perceived with the environment. Neisser (1988), an advocate of Gibson, classified self via 5 different forms of self–knowledge, each portraying a different aspect of self. Of these, the ecological self is an agent that regulates its encounters with the surroundings based on affordances the environment offers, whereas the interpersonal self is an agent that interacts with conspecifics based on the mutual affordances their interactions offer. For interpersonal selves to interact effectively with each other necessitates that their shared environment becomes common knowledge to all participants, based on information determined in accordance with the principle of ecological optics (in particular, information about occluding edges, reversible occlusion, and opaque and non-opaque substances). We suggest that Gibson’s principles of ecological optics be extended to the social domain, as he envisioned.