Harry Heft is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Denison University, where he has been working since 1976.
Heft teaches courses in environmental psychology, history and systems of psychology, and cultural psychology.
His scholarly interests primarily concern topics in the related areas of environmental and ecological psychology.
Abstract: Relational Concepts in Psychology Highlight Environment-Person Reciprocities for the Anthropocene.
The terminology we use in psychological inquiry plays a formative role in structuring and sustaining our ways of thinking about human and ecosystem processes. In this regard, even though many of the crises we now face clearly reveal the reciprocity of human actions and environmental processes over time, many concepts historically employed in psychological science assume, if only implicitly, a dualistic separation of the environment and the person that undermines recognition of that reciprocity dynamic. More fruitfully, we can turn to relational concepts rooted in radical empiricism (James) and pragmatism (Dewey) that take environment-person reciprocities as a starting point. On those philosophical foundations, empirically-based conceptual advances in ecological psychology over the past half century provide entry points for developing a relational terminology that comports with thinking in terms of environment-person reciprocities. The relational concepts of affordances and behavior settings will be explored in this presentation with an emphasis on the organismic processes of niche construction and sociocultural structuration in relation to human development.