Social Ecological Context of Conversing

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide some groundwork about ecological social psychology as a starting point for researchers tackling neglected issues of language ecologically. I review basic principles of the ecological approach to perceiving and acting and discuss how the ecological approach has been applied beyond solo actors in an ecological niche to multiple actors acting in a niche explicitly conceptualized as social. In the last decade, researchers were inspired by tool-use research and solo action-based research on affordances (e.g., stair climbing) to take an affordance-based approach to understanding cooperation in a more embodied approach than was previously used in social psychology. Beginning at least a decade prior to that, researchers were inspired to wonder whether the dynamics of the coordinative structures of a solo actor's body movements, spontaneously emerging when different limbs engaged in rhythmic movement, might cross the bodily divide to yield similar collective dynamics when multiple actors are incidentally engaged in rhythmic movement (e.g., different people swinging their legs together). One insight from the affordance research emphasizes the role of meaning as emerging in dynamic interaction between multiple actors confronted by demands and resources of an environment: language's potential contribution to this is discussed in the context of the newest advances in theorizing about values and about the sociocultural grounding of affordances. Finally, the potential role of language for facilitating being pulled into “social eddies” of coordinated orbits of motion, as well as its potential role in joint action, is discussed.