Behavior analysis and ecological psychology: past, present, and future. a review of Harry Heft's Ecological Psychology in context.
Ecological psychology gives BCBAs a new way to see how places shape behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Morris (2009) read Harry Heft’s book on ecological psychology.
The paper asks: can this field shake hands with behavior analysis?
It maps where the two camps agree and where they pass like ships.
What they found
Both camps hate hidden mind stuff. They want natural science you can watch.
Heft’s idea of ‘affordances’ fits Skinner’s big-picture behavior.
Yet the camps rarely cite each other; the wall is still up.
How this fits with other research
Hobson (1984) already cheered Gibson’s ecological view. Morris (2009) shows the talk is still going 25 years later.
Crosbie (1993) begged behavior analysts to look outward. Morris (2009) is an example of finally doing it.
Eagle (1985) and Ghaziuddin (2000) push behavior analysis into economics and offices. Morris (2009) pushes it into perception science, widening the same bridge.
Why it matters
If you write behavior plans, you can borrow the word ‘affordances.’ Ask: what does this room invite the client to do? A cluttered hall invites running; a clear path invites walking. You can rearrange space the way you rearrange consequences. No new gadgets needed—just a fresh lens from an old book.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Relations between behavior analysis and ecological psychology have been strained for years, notwithstanding the occasional comment on their affinities. Harry Heft's (2001)Ecological Psychology in Context provides an occasion for reviewing anew those relations and affinities. It describes the genesis of ecological psychology in James's radical empiricism; addresses Holt's neorealism and Gestalt psychology; and synthesizes Gibson's ecological psychology and Barker's ecobehavioral science as a means for understanding everyday human behavior. Although behavior analysis is excluded from this account, Heft's book warrants a review nonetheless: It describes ecological psychology in ways that are congruent and complementary with behavior analysis (e.g., nonmediational theorizing; the provinces of natural history and natural science). After introducing modern ecological psychology, I comment on (a) Heft's admirable, albeit selective, historiography; (b) his ecological psychology-past and present-as it relates to Skinner's science and system (e.g., affordances, molar behavior); (c) his misunderstandings of Skinner's behaviorism (e.g., reductionistic, mechanistic, molecular); and (d) the theoretical status of Heft's cognitive terms and talk (i.e., in ontology, epistemology, syntax). I conclude by considering the alliance and integration of ecological psychology and behavior analysis, and their implications for unifying and transforming psychology as a life science, albeit more for the future than at present.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2009 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2009.92-275