What Makes an Ecological Psychology Ecological?

Abstract

The term "ecology" has been employed by psychologists in a variety of ways, and yet most efforts have developed independently of the others. Ecological psychologists have rarely attempted to clarify either what is distinctive about their employment of the term in comparison to that of others, nor - and most critically - what ecological means more broadly when it is applied to psychological theory. After distinguishing among various uses of the term 'ecological' within psychology, the paper offers an overview of the essential characteristics of an ecological approach. These characteristics include animal-environment reciprocity; action, events, and change; meaningful properties of the environment considered both at the level of individual action (affordances) and collective action (behavior settings); the place of sociocultural structures in psychological analysis; and variation across environments and cultures.