Reuben M. Baron

In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.

The ecological approach to perception (J. Gibson, 1979; Shaw, Turvey, & Mace, 1982) is applied to the social domain. The general advantages of this approach are enumerated, its applicability to social perception is documented, and its specific implications for research on emotion perception, impression formation, and causal attribution are discussed. The implications of the ecological approach for our understanding of errors in social perception are also considered. Finally, the major tenets of the ecological approach are contrasted with current cognitive approaches, and a plea is made for greater attention to the role of perception in social knowing.

How and why the presence of a person directly affects the perception and action of another person is a phenomenon that has been approached in a limited and piecemeal fashion within psychology. This kind of diffuse strategy has failed to capture the jointness of perception and action within and between people. In contradistinction, the authors offer a perspective that retains both integrally social features (e.g., involves interaction) and yet adequately exploits the current state of knowledge regarding the ecological properties of perception–action, while at the same time drawing on aspects of dynamic systems theory. In this article the authors review the best attempts to examine how one individual affects another’s perceptions and actions in the emergence of a social unit of action. Two important approaches, the individual-level and cognitive dynamics approaches, have yielded insights that derive in significant degree from principles of ecological psychology and/or dynamical systems theory. Prototypic of the individual-level approach is a focus on what can be perceived by coactors with the aim of uncovering how the dispositional qualities (affordances) of another person are informationally specified during social interaction. In contrast, the cognitive dynamics approach simulates dynamical characteristics of cognition and psychological influence with the aim of uncovering how cooperative interaction emerges out of its component parts. The authors argue that these approaches involve, respectively, insufficient mutuality and insufficient embodiment. Consequently, a social synergy perspective is discussed that approaches the problem of socially cooperative interaction at the relational, nonreductive level, using novel methods to examine how social perception and action emerge through self-organizing processes.

The current study investigated the perception of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and tool-based grasping possibilities. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether they would grasp planks of wood-presented in ascending, descending, and random orders of length-using one hand (1H), two hands (2H), or with a tool that extended their reach (TH). In Experiment 2, participants physically grasped the planks using 1H, 2H, or TH. In Experiments 3 and 4, the choice of TH was replaced with a choice of grasping the planks with another person (2P). The results showed that presentation order influenced the participants' behavior differently in the judgment and action experiments. The same behavioral patterns, however, were observed when participants switched between 1H and 2H, 2H and TH, and 2H and 2P grasping. The point at which participants judged they would switch between the different modes of grasping, as well as the point at which participants physically switched between the grasping modes, occurred at similar action-scaled ratios. The equivalence of perceiving intrapersonal and interpersonal affordances is discussed.