On the Ecological Relevance of Psychological Research

Abstract

M. On the ecological relevance of psychological research. Scand. J. Psychol., 1969,10,145-157.--It is argued that lack of ecological relevance is due to (a) the 'organismic bias' of theories, where the ecological aspects have not been sufficiently considered, (b) the emphasis on methodological criteria which have lead researches to deal with problems of little ecological relevance, and (c) the fact that conceptions of the real world have not been made sufficiently explicit. Rather than being representative, theories should be biased towards those aspects which are important in the real world. The lens model illustrates how ecological notions have been formalised into a model. Lens model experiments can contribute to valid knowledge about cognitive inference in various ecological contexts.

The Role of Representative Design in an Ecological Approach to Cognition.

“…Brunswik's conception of representative design had some major difficulties, and although others have used these as objections to his method (e.g., Birnbaum, 1982;Bjo ¨rkman, 1969;Hochberg, 1966;Leeper, 1966;Mook, 1989;Sjo ¨berg, 1971), he acknowledged many of them himself. First, there are practical problems in terms of the lack of experimental control and the time-consuming and cumbersome nature of research conducted outside the laboratory (Brunswik, 1944(Brunswik, , 1955c(Brunswik, , 1956.…”

“…Those close to Brunswik also pointed to the difficulties associated with designing experiments to meet his criteria for representativeness (Gibson, 1957/2001; Hammond, 1966; Tolman, 1955). Björkman (1969) suggested that the concept of representativeness be replaced by the idea of ecological relevance, so “ rather than [samples] being representative they should be samples biased towards those aspects which are considered important for man's adaptation in the real world ” (p. 153). Hochberg (1966) and Leeper (1966) proposed that some form of unrepresentative, extreme group sampling procedure would be sufficient to assess the validity of generalizations based on selective samples of variables.…”

Organizational Productivity as a Function of Group Composition: A Self-Attention Perspective

“…Granting these limitations, this methodology still provides access to what might otherwise be an inaccessible type of social behavior. The high ecological validity (Bjorkman, 1969) of this archival data set is offered to compensate for the necessary lack of control.…”

Eulogy: Mats Björkman (1926–2001)

“…At this time, Mats Björkman also presented an innovative reformulation of the ecological psychology proposed by Egon Brunswik. Rather than to pursue the search, in practice often futile, for a sample of situations that is truly representative of the organism's natural environment (i.e., representative design ), the purpose should be to establish ecological relevance of the theories that are tested in the laboratory (Björkman, 1969b). In 1973 Mats Björkman provided a partial extension of the lens model to nonmetric cues (Björkman, 1973).…”