Self-other contingencies: enacting social perception

Abstract

Can we see the expressiveness of other people's gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot, because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea, because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that they hold promise since, in trying to understand cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cogniser with his world. In this paper we attempt an answer for the question What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action (perception is action and action is perception), an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities or contingencies that characterise a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which the social skills structure – both constrain and empower – social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the importance of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed.