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What it Means to be Interact-able: A Social Affordance Perspective

Eiler, Brian A.
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9537-8975
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447688671

Abstract Details

2015, MA, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: Psychology.
Social interaction is not random. There is not a single prototypical social interaction; they are guided and functional. This begs the question, why do we interact with particular individuals initially and how to we maintain these interactions over time? How do we explain initiating social interactions and how do we explain interaction extended in time? Social-cognitive approaches to person perception argue that social cognition is the detecting particular types of person characteristics about others (i.e. sex and race) for use during interaction. Yet, this approach does not account for perceptual-motor processes like biological motion or coordination, which are known to impact social interaction broadly. The ecological perspective has been successful in explaining behavior in terms of perception and action. Here, social cognition is conceptualized as an emergent outcome of a nested system of agent-environment and agent-agent-environment perception action systems that realize behavioral opportunities for interaction—or said differently, social affordances. As both the social-cognitive and ecological approach have contributed to our understanding of initial interaction, this project combined these approaches to understand how movement and movement coordination relate to social cognition and a particular social affordance, interact-ability. It was expected that biological motion would specify invariant person characteristics (i.e. sex and race) and movement coordination would be associated with greater prosociality and interact-ability. To test these hypotheses I employed a mixed design in which participants coordinated with kinematic information or kinematic information embedded in body structure and subsequently made target characteristic judgments. Results indicated that movement kinematics were necessary but not sufficient for sex detection, and that kinematics embedded in body structure afforded more accurate detection. Race was not detectable from biological motion. Movement coordination was also unrelated to interact-ability or detection accuracy for sex or race. Results indicated that both dynamic and structural properties are influential in determining the sex of an individual from their movement patterns. For race, results supported race as a social construction, rather than a biomechanical constraint. Coordination stability was conceptualized as a task constraint on social cognition. Theoretical contributions and implications are discussed in terms of interaction-dominant dynamical systems and complexity, as it relates to the study of social cognition more broadly.
Rachel Kallen, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Anthony Chemero, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Michael Richardson, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
65 p.
Psychology
biological motion; social cognition; social affordances; movement coordination; interaction dominant dynamics

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Eiler, B. A. (2015). What it Means to be Interact-able: A Social Affordance Perspective [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447688671

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Eiler, Brian. What it Means to be Interact-able: A Social Affordance Perspective. 2015. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447688671.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Eiler, Brian. "What it Means to be Interact-able: A Social Affordance Perspective." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1447688671

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1447688671
429
© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.