The Ecological Social Psychology of Aviation Disasters

Abstract

Reuben Baron’s primary contribution to ecological psychology was in promoting the idea that we perceive other humans and animals in our environment in much the same way as we perceive inanimate objects, namely, by actively detecting information. Here, we explore how this insight can lead to a deeper understanding of real-world behavior. We look specifically at three case studies from the history of commercial aviation disasters. In our analysis we combine Baron’s direct social perception strategy with the theoretical principles of the distributed cognition approach to functional group activity. We suggest that these approaches are deeply compatible, and that future work is needed to ground cognitive study of team activities in the analysis of the perceptual information available to the actors.