Socio-Ecological Attunement: Social Attitudes Influence the Detection of Affordances

Abstract

Reuben Baron’s ecological approach to social perception simultaneously emphasized both the perceptual nature of social judgment and the social nature of perception. One novel contribution of this work was an expansion of the concept of attunement, arguing that the detection of affordances could be guided not only by physiological constraints, but also by culture, attitudes, motivation, and social roles. In this paper, I provide an empirical demonstration of this principle by testing how social attitudes (i.e. sexist beliefs) can influence the detection of affordances in objects associated with a particular gender. An online sample of participants (n = 212) was presented with a series of objects and asked to identify which could be used for novel actions. The objects presented were pre-tested to have either masculine, feminine, or neutral associations. A mixed effects logistic regression revealed a three-way interaction between participant gender, the object’s association, and the participants’ hostile sexism. Specifically, men high in hostile sexism were significantly less likely to identify a functional object when it was feminine. This finding demonstrates that even the individual perception of an inanimate object’s affordances is a social psychological process, supporting Baron’s argument that all human behavior is a form of groupthink.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Other statistically significant effects in the model did not change when excluding these control variables.

2 These excluded cases accounted for 15.7% of the trials.