The Field of Invitations

In my recent book Affective Gibsonian Psychology (2022), I made a relatively sharp distinction between affordances and invitations. I argued that to understand (some of) our behavior, we need to distinguish between the two. In the present paper, I develop the argument for this distinction a little further. It is argued that the concept of affordances aids in capturing the ecological values in the animals’ environments. This helps one to determine the adaptiveness and appropriateness of behavior. However, drawing upon examples from everyday life, it is argued that the concept of affordances does not suffice to account for our behavior. It needs to be complemented by the concept of the field of invitations. We are affective beings—the world always affects us, and it does so in a rich variety of ways. Hence, any psychology attempting to understand our everyday activity needs to capture how we are moved by the environment. I end with detailing the field of invitations.