What is Ecological Psychology

Learning about ecological psychology was a pleasant frustration.

Ecological Psychology challenged how I talk and the ways I thought about my experiences of the world.

This approach is radically different.

If you’re saying bullshit you are likely where I was almost 10 years.

For the sceptics reading this, I have invited Jonathan Stewart to write this article with me.

I introduced Jon to the ecological approach in 2023, and we have discussed it on our podcast ever since.

Jon will tell you his side of the story but when I first shared the approach with him, he called bullshit too.

In this article Jon and I will cover:

  • Guidelines of the Ecological approach.
  • Adopting an Ecological Approach.
  • WTF Ecological Psychology is to us.

What is Ecological Psychology

Bare with me here.

In the book Introduction to Ecological Psychology the authors say:

We group every perspective that is not ecological into one category (which we label for convenience, the traditional approach)

We will do the same.

Traditional approaches to psychology are built from assumptions about perception and action.

Yes. Traditional assumptions differ. But they all lead to unsolvable mysteries.

For those unsure.

Yes, perception is psychological.

Psychology is often referred to as the study of the ‘mind’ and behaviour.

But that is where the first conflict lies.

Mind and behaviour. Separate. A dualism.

Ecology studies the relationship between animals and their environment.

Combined.

Thus, Ecological Psychology studies embodied cognition.

Mind and behaviour not separate. Combined.

The relationship between an organism and environment.

Guidelines of the ecological approach

These ten commandments are commonly followed guidelines of the ecological approach. Not rules!

You can’t pick and choose what you want to believe.

This approach is a collection of interconnected ideas from direct perception. It's is all or nothing. Accepted or rejected.

You can’t take bits and claim the approach.

Rob Gray discussed this in a podcast a couple of years ago, but this is how I would explain the commandments.

Commandment 1: thou shalt not separate organism and environment.

Traditional approaches treat the skin as a boundary line between organism and environment, but Ecological Psychology looks at relational properties.

Relationships between organism and environment.

Commandment 2: thou shall not take the name information in vain.

Information has lots of meanings making it a challenging word to use. Thanks Gibson.

But with James Gibson’s approach to visual perception being direct, information is unambiguous.

Information is uniquely structured.

Commandment 3: thou shalt regard perception as the detection of information

We detect unambiguous specifying information.

We don’t interpret information sensed.

Commandment 4: thou shalt not compute

Once we have detected information we don’t ‘process’ or compute a mental representation.

Perception is not indirect.

We don’t need to compute representations as we assume direct perception.

Commandment 5: thou shalt not separate perception and action

We perceive for action and action reveals information we perceive.

Perception and action is a coupled continuous process.

Commandment 6: thou shalt have only one science before thee

Multiple areas of science try and describe mechanisms of systems, but they aren’t needed.

Humans are just another complex dynamical system.

We can explain all those relationships with one science. An ecological science.

Commandment 7: thou shalt not steal intelligence.

When traditional approaches can’t account for knowledge, it requires knowledge from somewhere else.

A loan of intelligence as Daniel Dennet called it.

The ecological approach doesn’t rely on a loan of intelligence.

Commandment 8: thou shalt honour, exploit, and enlarge physical law.

Laws of physics shouldn’t be ignored when explaining human behaviour and interactions.

Physics of objects should be applied to humans.

We don’t need a ‘human’ version of the physics.

Commandment 9: thou shalt not make unto thee any mental image or likeness of anything

No mental representations when thinking. None.

There are lawful explanations.

We need time to find the specifying information sources and control laws.

Commandment 10: thou shalt change with experience.

Empiricism. We learn from our experiences.

Education of attention changes the information used.

Education of intention changes aspects we control.

Practiced attention and intention calibrate our learning.

Thus learning can happen without storage, representation, or memory.

If you are saying what the f*ck. You are likely not alone.

In essence you can’t split the system – us – into parts.

But Jon didn’t know about any of these commandments to start with.

Just start doing

Jon here…

For quite a while I’ve always been given that question, I never saw myself as much of a ‘productive person’, but I was often asked

How do you do soo much?

and was often told to

slow down.

Everyone is always talking about ‘being organised’, getting stuff done… and honestly I spent a lot of time thinking I had no clue… because I didn’t.

I just did stuff…

But as I started to build my business,

I was always stuck in this never-ending cycle of ‘doing’ but it not feeling like it mattered.

I could never really do certain things.

I often ended up following advise like:

  • You need to do less stuff.
  • You need to streamline.
  • You gotta do less… prioritise.

But for me that never quite made sense…

I can’t doo any less… I’m already doing ‘less’

I’m only really prioritising things I have to do.

I start but don't end up getting things done... at least not in the way I'm 'supposed to'.

So I set out to try and organise myself, and ‘find a solution’.

I wanted to know and understand ‘How to Do The Right Way!’

But this question lead me down quite the rabbit hole.

  • Productivity and Organisation (how I’m supposed to do things)
  • Systems Thinking…
  • What apps are best for getting things done…
  • What do I need to get things done…

The list went on, and on, and on, and honestly everyone had different answers, everyone swore by this one solution.

It was focused on fixing the broken pieces of my brain…

I thought 'my brain' didn't work properly.

Just focus

  • Focus (Laser Sharp Focus – get rid of distractions)
  • FOCUS… on Building Habits
  • FOCUS on… your perfect morning…
  • FOCUS… FOCUS… FOCUS…
  • “Set yourself up for success.”
  • Creating a North Star experience

I started out where most self proclaimed unproductive people go, exploring the internet!

Learning about all the hacks to 'get my brain to behave'.

I just needed to learn ‘how to focus.’ That will fix everything.

Hold it… nope.

I need LASER SHARP FOCUS.

Once I know how to focus, I can do things.

The focus comes first.

I need to cut out all distractions.

Playing video games. Get rid of it (you rot your brain this way.)

Playing guitar. Get rid of it. (unless you’re dedicated X time to practice.)

Uninstall everything that isn’t work related.

Anything that interests me. Get rid of it. (unless it’s work.)

Your crazy monkey lizard brain... is set up for distraction and making your life hard...

JEEZZZ… that did wonders for my confidence and faith in my own ability to grow my business 😁

It just sucked…

I was being told automatically that I was ‘not focused’, that’s the reason I was unsuccessful…

So I started following the advice:

  • I spent time “training my focus” — removing all the possible distractions from my life, and just focusing on “one thing”. (except… I didn’t really know which thing to start with, because I had quite a few things on my plate, kids, family, responsibilities… so would I have to sacrifice some of that?) So I needed to spend my time focusing on improving my focus.
  • Create Life Changing Habits — I just needed to “install” the correct habits, follow the rules that “successful people” follow and just implement all of those things word-for-word then I’d be “successful” (Oh… and obviously there’s an app for that sigh) So if I spent my time paying attention on crafting “good habits” I’d be more productive, I’d get more done.
  • Prioritisation & Deep Work — I have got to get good at getting rid of everything that wasn’t “super important” and “key” and focus on creating “Deep Work Cycles” that would “solve everything”. I need to spend my time, focusing on prioritising and doing deep work on the “high priority things”, but only once I figured out “my Peak Focus Times”, which I needed to focus on…. To do this… I have to “time track correctly” so it’s “boosting my productivity”. So I had to pay attention to how I worked in the day, and figure out what those are, and bottle them up as a repeated process…
  • Creating “SMART ACTIONABLE GOALS… — I needed to create goals and all these goals have to be “realistic”, specific (but not toooo specific?) Actionable… and Time Based. I needed to have a long term vision and have everything turned into “actionable steps” but only after I vision boarded, and made it CLEAR… and got rid of every task/project that DOESN’T directly lead to that goal. I needed to spend time goal setting, and setting my “future self up for success.”
  • Deadlines. Deadlines Then I needed to set myself deadlines… I need to connect the dots between my goals, and my daily tasks… and make sure that I’m constantly reviewing them. So I needed to focus not just on my daily tasks, but that they’re all linking back to DEADLINES DEADLINES DEADLINES.

So… this means, If I wanted to be productive I had to:

  • Improve my focus and not get distracted.
  • Focus on Habits
  • Focus on Prioritising, and then doing “Deep Work”
  • Focus on setting goals, that are SMART.
  • Focus on meeting deadlines.

But… to be able to focus on these things, I needed to learn how to focus, and to learn how to focus I needed to focus.

So… I was stuck in this loop of trying to “train myself to focus” by focusing on stuff I didn’t really give to shits about.

However, I started asking… What is focus?

Focus = Attention?

From Attention → Perception.

After continuing in a loop for a while, I recognised that actually this really, really sucked.

I was not getting things done, I was focusing on focusing… to get things done.

I was setting up plans, and organising systems, and focusing on Habits all in the process of trying to ‘be more focused’ because if I achieved that… I could finally get things done.

I found myself looking into focus, and it lead me to attention…

I wanted to learn how to pay attention.

I found myself looking into a variety of different ‘theories’.

After a while I landed on one.

Gestalt Psychology.

For me… this is where my journey into Ecological Psychology really began.

I stopped thinking about focus and started thinking about ‘attention’.

Or to be more specific. The direction I was looking whilst taking action on things, aka perception.

It just so happens that Gestalt Psychologists adore perception, and also the entire approach is less focused on the ‘group of things’ and a little more on a holistic approach.

It was the first approach that was aimed around the individual, and also the relationship between an experience and the individual.

Gestalt Therapy, which focused in on ‘awareness’ that could split apart what we perceived, our feelings and the actions away from their interpretations.

Perception.
Feeling.
Action.

So I dove into the research to try and ‘unlock my productivity’, because honestly it started to make a lot of sense.

I could make sense of what I saw, and it helped me to ‘process’ the information, and then I could action it.

I dove into trying to understand it could all work, and even there were the beginnings of Ecological Psychology.

In one of my old notes I found this:

Gestalt Psychologists believe that rather than seeing individual components we see things as patterns. We visually percieve information in different groupings.

It was there I started to understand ‘Awareness’.

According to Gestalt Theorists we are driven to create patterns to gain awareness, which means we have to focus on what’s happening now…

We need to be constantly aware of what’s happening in the present.

One of my favourite quotes is the following quote from a past client of mine (yes… I did have a Gestalt Client I supported their business launch… and yes… it was fascinating).

Change happens when you accept who you are. Change is effort when you want to be different from who you are.

This is where I was introduced to The Cycle of Experience.

To summarise, Gestalt Psychologists believe this to be around how we identify our needs, take action to meet them, and learn from the process.

It’s something that’s done dynamically, and it’s continuous.

This felt like the first example of something I could actually interact with.

I could actually just see naturally in my day to day life.

It didn’t need to be ‘created’, ‘crafted’, it didn’t need to be ‘guesswork’.

It was something I could directly perceive. (didn’t realise it was that…. at the time it was something that I’ve now discovered…)

This was significant

This was the first step into moving away from the idea that I was just broken.

Moving away from the idea that I needed to hack things together, and towards an approach that just worked with how I naturally worked…

It didn’t need some extra complicated process, or organisation, I didn’t need to start ‘processing’ it, or spend hours and hours analysing what was happening.

It was a step in the right direction… it felt right.

Except…It still didn’t quite answer all my questions:

  • So If I can perceive patterns, how do I ‘process them’ into action.
  • I’m forever experiencing these cycles, how do I know which ones to pay attention to?
  • What about processing?
  • How do I stop feeling overwhelmed?

I realised that this part of the process.

It was ‘just happening’ and I didn’t understand why… I didn’t get how I did it… but I started to see things slowly change.

Differences from the traditional approach

Danny here… Having wrestled with these ideas longer than Jon, most of my differences between the approaches comes from experiences explaining the approach to others.

Not developing my understanding of the approach.

At least thinking closer to the time I am writing this.

For me, there are 3 main differences:

  • Look at the whole organism, not their parts.
  • Direct perception doesn’t need a copy.
  • We don’t have a central executive.

When introducing ecological psychology to someone for the first time, its hard!

We are obviously organisms

Saying ‘we are an organismic system’ gets two different reactions. Acceptance or confusion.

Mostly confusion.

I like to use this car example to explain my point.

A car doesn’t reject a new tire. The parts builds the whole system.

But a human can reject a new heart.

Despite careful consideration humans can still reject a heart. We are a system, but also an organism.

It’s extremely difficult to separate a part from a complex dynamic organismic system like humans.

Even if you do, when the part is put back, the system is significantly different.

So when we explain our problems to try and solve them, we should explain the whole problem, not a small part.

More on problems later.

There are 2 approaches to perception

Explaining direct perception is not so straight forward.

Most people aren’t familiar with indirect perception and the associated assumptions.

Thus, challenging assumptions they are unaware off is a non-starter.

I use the eye diagram from science lessons at school to discuss this.

Most people find remembering easier when I start explaining.

Retinal image diagram from cognitive psychology

We see stuff and it makes a small copy at the back of our eye.

Not entirely accurate I know, but it gets the main point across.

Indirect perception creates a copy of the world.

Well what if we don't create that copy of the world... That is direct perception.

You have probably been told or assume that when we ‘process’ things, we are interpreting and doing calculations on that copy of the world.

Processing our mental representation of the world.

But the ecological approach says no.

I refer back to commandment 9.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any mental image or likeness of anything.

The copy requires a central executive

Traditional approaches discuss unconscious processing.

We aren’t aware of the brain’s processing. It just happens.

But a thing or entity must be doing the processing.

In most of science this ‘thing’ is called the central executive.

However, if we assume direct perception and we don't need the copy of the world, we don't need the thing. The central executive.

That then challenges ideas about the mind and body dualism.

But also challenges explanations of problem solving.

Your brain isn’t the problem when you struggle. It isn’t the central executive because we don’t have one.

Your struggle is in the relationship between you and the environment.

The affordances you perceive, and action capabilities you have developed.

Obvious but radical ideas

Ideas from the ecological approach appear in conversation.

But the ideas are often anecdotal, or unevidenced.

Educators making suggestions because ‘it just makes sense’.

However, the ideas do have scientific evidence.

I mentioned at the start about challenging how you talk. Guy Claxton discussed teacher language and said.

We need to be vigilant about ability talk.

Stop saying things like:

  • These are the bright kids.
  • They are average.
  • This is my good group.
  • Our class is mixed ability.

Ability is a noun. A static thing.

The ecological approach looks at continuous processes. Perceiving-acting-cognizing systems.

We should therefore verb our nouns.

Perception -> perceiving.

Attention -> attending.

Memory -> remembering.

Acquired abilities -> developing capabilities.

An ongoing process of skill development.

As Guy goes on to say:

ability language [...] is lazy and dysfunctional.

This could, and did with me, change how you think about educating and learning.

Thus, challenging the ways you think about your experience of the world.

A machine can perceive and act using prediction calculations.

But machines rely on programmers.

CEU Robot shooting basketball

Software engineers telling the machine how to calculate and what to calculate.

This is a loan of intelligence.

Who tells us?

Maybe we are actually living in the matrix…

As cool as that sounds, I don’t think, and I hope, that isn’t true.

Ecological dynamics is how this approach is being put into practice.

Ideas like:

  • The constraints led approach.
  • Repetition without repetition.
  • Representative practice design.

The educator doesn't need to 'loan their intelligence' to the learner. The learner develops the skills from their self organized experiences.

Not necessarily new ideas, but new explanations which can lead to alternative behaviours.

This shift in language is what I exposed Jon to which has lead to his behaviour change.

WTF is Ecological Psychology.

Heyyy I’m back… Jon that is.

One of the final ‘sticking points’ in my relationship with ‘doing things’ was… I felt I had no control.

I had a better understanding of ‘how I perceived’, according to Gestalt, but it still felt a little bit inconsistent.

For me, even with this information about our cycle of experience, it felt like it was happening to me.

I still remained out of control, and it ‘just happened’.

At least now I understood that attention was more than just an #on-off’ experience, it was a continuous experience.

But it was still happening to me, which still felt off.

I did have some resemblance of control, at least I could focus.

Sometimes it was easier than other times, but now I experienced that as a fertile void, I was ‘taking in that information’, and my experience was ‘growing’.

But… how did I know where in the cycle I was, and also… these cycles aren’t only tied to one thing are they? How do I dissect them apart.

These questions became… overwhelming.

It was just too freaking complicated! There was soo much I 'had to learn' before I could just get things done.

I was continuing to try and figure out WHAT was going on, and how to just get things done.

But then I started wondering if I was asking the wrong question.

This either came through a prompting from Danny, or it was something I was already considering… remembering which is difficult.

I’d been assuming that the information would ‘fix my focus’.

I believed that if I understand the cycle of experience, I could harness and manipulate it, as I gain awareness of how the cycle works…

Then I could start to ‘train’ my lizard brain.

But what if I assume that what I’m doing isn’t wrong?

What if I start to assume that how I experience the world… was right?

I started moving away from the binary opinion of yes or no, bad or good.

This lead me to start asking questions about what happened when I was doing stuff.

Because doing stuff ‘just felt like it happened’ with certain tasks, and activities.

I wasn't thinking about being focused, I just wanted to get things done.

I knew what I was looking to achieve, and to do that I needed to do these things to achieve it.

If I wanted to play my guitar more. I needed it to be easy to play my guitar.

Otherwise there’ll be 100 other things I could do instead, that are quicker and easily accessible…

So I left my guitar out… this meant as it was easy, I was drawn to it… especially as I wanted to play it more, just without all the faff of getting it out of it’s case.

Then when it served it’s purpose it’d go back ‘into the ground’ and I’d do something else.

As I looked around my room, I could perceive opportunities for action I could take.

All I needed to do was think… what did I want to do and what here could allow me to do that.

So when people ask, WTF is Ecological Psychology?

I would say, a way to actually do things!

Danny here, just stepping in at the end…

For me Ecological Psychology is a way to explain my experiences more accurately.

Thus, allows for more effective constraints to be added or removed for behaviour change.

Ecological Psychology has helped me overcome my mental health struggles, physical struggles and various behavioural issues.

Ecological Psychology isn't a silver bullet, but it has helped me - and by the sounds of it Jon so it might be worth some time.

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About me...

Yes. That space background is my wallpaper. My first selfie turned out pretty good if I do say so myself.

I’ve been researching how we learn since I was 17, and now at 27 I’ve coached, taught and advised more activities than I thought existed.

Over the last 3 years, I’ve helped thousands learn technical software.

Now I’m all-in on sharing insights into educational science.