All mental processes invariably take place within a biological body that moves and acts in a physical environment. The acknowledgment of this fact lies at the heart of recent approaches to understanding cognition that emphasize its embodied and situated nature. Rather than thinking of the environment as merely the background in which an individual thinks and acts, we instead seek to understand how the individual and the environment constitute an inseparable, unitary system. James Gibson’s ecological concept of an environment’s affordances, which are defined as the relational, behavioral opportunities that an environment offers a particular perceiver, captures this idea. For example, a chair may afford sitting to an average-sized human, but it also affords climbing, reclining, or hiding-under for a cat. Perceivers must be attuned to this action-oriented information because it is through an awareness of the environment’s possibilities that organisms are actually able to survive within them.

These principles can be applied not just to how we think about particular objects, but also to entire physical settings. As an illustration, the office layouts shown here offer quite different behavioral opportunities to the people within them. One is designed to afford social interaction, whereas the other is designed to afford individual seclusion. My research seeks to understand how people’s experience and awareness of these affordances depends on their relative fit within that environment. Occupants may differ in terms of their social motivations (e.g., being recently rejected), or in terms of their personality (e.g., being high in extraversion or agreeableness), or in terms of their relationship with the other occupants (e.g., being friends or enemies). These factors have the potential to strongly influence people’s impressions of these environments, in terms of preference, judgments of space and distance, and the capacity to detect behavioral opportunities. For example, my lab is currently investigating how judgments of religious worship spaces are guided by particular attributes of congregants (e.g., motivations for worship, attachment to God) that make them better or worse suited for environments that differ in terms of visual coherence, complexity, and mystery. Despite their seemingly ethereal nature, spiritual experiences and rituals are events necessarily embedded within actual environments that can either inhibit or facilitate the actions and emotions associated with worship.

Beyond simply being the target of perception, the physical world also plays an active role in guiding and constraining the behaviors that we can engage in. Moreover, how well we perform a particular behavior is also influenced by the specific physical environment that we are in. The phenomenon of home advantage, the tendency for residents to disproportionately prevail during competition over visitors, is perhaps the best demonstration of this fact, having been observed across a wide variety of both tasks and species. However, the cause of this effect remains an open question. My lab has begun testing the proposal that these performance differences are the result of more efficient perceptual activity on the part of residents, who benefit from being in an ambient array of information that is both highly familiar and highly self-associative. These factors aid in the detection of a broader range of behavioral opportunities.

This theory can also be applied to the group level. Cultural norms often emerge regarding which objects in the physical world are the de facto territory of particular social groups. For example, the two objects on the right are very similar in terms of their structural (e.g., size, shape) and functional (e.g., graspable, lift-able) properties, but they have quite different social associations in terms of who can and who should utilize their affordances. We are now assessing the behavioral implications of these associations by testing how social attitudes (e.g., sexism) influence a perceiver’s impressions of these types of objects, as well as whether individuals show a reduced ability to detect the behavioral opportunities afforded by objects associated with out-groups.

All papers below are available upon request. Feel free to send me an email.

Physical Embeddedness Publications

Meagher, B. R., & Anderson, B. (in press). There’s no place like dorm: Actual-ideal dorm ambiance as a unique predictor of undergraduate mental health. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2023.2265307

Counted, V., Meagher, B. R., & Cowden, R. (in press). The nature of spiritual ties to place: A conceptual overview and research agenda. Ecopsychology. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2022.0078

Meagher, B. R. (in press). Seeing God in this place: God concepts are associated with impressions of religious places. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000482

Meagher, B. R. (2023). Worship space attachment as a contributor to spiritual growth. To appear in V. Counted, H. Ramkissoon, L. Capatari, & R. Cowden (Eds.), Place, spirituality, and wellbeing: A global and multidisciplinary approach (pp. 21-35). Springer.

Marsh, K. L., Meagher, B. R., & Burt, C. J. (forthcoming). Designing meaningful environments post-Darwin: How spaces affect perceptions & behaviors. To appear in T. Glass & L. T. Graham (Eds.), The importance of space: Experience, ethics, and impact. Routledge.

Marsh, K. L., & Meagher, B. R. (2023). Humanizing ecological psychology: Heft’s incorporation of the sociohistorical into perceiving and acting. In M. Segundo-Ortin, M. Heras-Escribano, and V. Raja (Eds.), Places, sociality, and ecological psychology: Essays in honor of Harry Heft (pp. 125-137). Routledge.

Meagher, B. R., Cook, J., Silver, S. C., Van Doosselaere, M., Wint, J. I., & Zheng, X. (2023). Be our guest: The development of the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 105(2), 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2022.2052302

Meagher, B. R. (forthcoming). Worship space attachment as a contributor to spiritual growth. To appear in V. Counted, H. Ramkissoon, L. Capatari, & R. Cowden (Eds.), The science of place, spirituality, and wellbeing. Springer.

Meagher, B. R., & Cheadle, A. D. (2020). Distant from others, but close to home: The relationship between home attachment and mental health during COVID-19. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 72, 101516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101516

Meagher, B. R. (2020). Seeing yourself in your room: The relationship between undergraduate flourishing and identification with student housing. Journal of College and University Student Housing, 4(1), 28-42. https://www.nxtbook.com/acuho-i/acuho/journal_vol47no1/index.php#/p/28

Meagher, B. R. (2020). Ecologizing social psychology: The physical environment as a necessary constituent of social processes. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 24, 3-23. doi:10.1177/1088868319845938 [Coverage in: American Association for the Advancement of Science]

Meagher, B. R. (2018). Deciphering the religious orientation of a sacred space: Disparate impressions of worship settings by congregants and external observers. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 55, 70-80. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2017.12.007

Meagher, B. R. (2017). Judging the gender of the inanimate: Benevolent sexism and gender stereotypes guide impressions of physical objects. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56, 537-560. doi:10.1111/bjso.12198

Meagher, B. R., & Marsh, K. L. (2017). Seeking the safety of sociofugal space: Environmental design preferences following social ostracism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68, 192-199. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2016.07.004 [Click here to download the Preference for Sociopetal Space Scale used in this study.]

Meagher, B. R. (2016). There’s no place like a neurotic’s home: Neuroticism moderates the prioritization of restorative properties in home environments. Journal of Individual Differences, 37, 260-267. doi:10.1027/1614-0001/a000213

Marsh, K. L., & Meagher, B. R. (2016). Affordances and interpersonal coordination. In P. Passos, K. Davids, & J.Y. Chow (Eds.), Interpersonal coordination and performance in social systems (pp. 245-258). London, UK: Routledge.

Meagher, B. R. (2016). Perceiving sacred space: Religious orientation moderates impressions of religious settings. Environment and Behavior, 48, 1030-1048. doi:10.1177/0013916515581626

Meagher, B. R., & Marsh, K. L. (2015). Testing an ecological account of spaciousness in real and virtual environments. Environment and Behavior, 47, 782-815. doi:10.1177/0013916514525039 [Coverage in: The New Yorker]

Meagher, B. R., & Marsh, K. L. (2014). The costs of cooperation: Action-specific perception in the context of joint action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 40, 429-444. doi:10.1037/a0033850

Meagher, B. R., & Fowler, C. A. (2014). Embedded articulation: shifts in location influence speech production. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 561-567. doi:10.1080/01690965.2013.791704

Meagher, B. R., & Kang, J. J. (2013). Gender identification as a constraint on detecting multiple affordances. In T. Davis, P. Passos, M. Dicks, & J. A. Weast-Knapp (Eds.), Studies in perception and action XII: Seventeenth international conference on perception and action (pp. 106-109). Psychology Press. {conference proceedings}

Meagher, B. R., & Marsh, K. L. (2011). Judgments of interior spaces: The role of affordances. In E. Charles & L. J. Smart (Eds.), Studies in perception and action XI: Sixteenth international conference on perception and action (pp. 163-167). Psychology Press. {conference proceedings}