Why Direct Social Perception Theory Needs To Be More Gibsonian

The current debate on social perception is dominated by the invisibility principle: the assumption that mental states are inherently private and unobservable. Direct social perception theorists challenge this view, arguing that the mental states of others can be perceived directly. At present, however, there is no widely agreed programmatic approach for studying social perception as a direct phenomenon. In this paper, we identify three strategies that have been proposed by researchers to advance the direct social perception account. The empirical strategy emphasizes the need for experimental evidence; the Anscombean strategy highlights the importance of separating the analyst’s description of an action from the actor’s own perspective; finally, the Gestalt strategy proposes viewing mental states, such as emotions, as patterns of structures that occur across space and time. We argue that all three strategies can be pursued within the Gibsonian framework. The Gibsonian approach stresses the importance of ecological information, understood as structures in the environment discriminable in perception. We suggest that the Gibsonian perspective offers a coherent foundation for understanding social perception without relying on mentalistic inference.