Behavior settings also may serve as a bridge between the foundational work of Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela on Autopoiesis[1] and the insights developed in American pragmatism and Continental activity theory.
By itself, a standing pattern of behavior is meaningless; it would be like watching a person pretending to go to the dentist's office and having a cavity filled.
We see in the eminent ecological psychologist, Roger G. Barker's conception, an elegant and stable view of the nested interrelationships that exist within our common experience.
[4] Barker also develops a useful analogy for conceptualizing this relation, as well as preparing readers for later claims about behavior settings.
If we were only to look at the eye-optic channel at the instant that light hit the receptor surface, we would know nothing of depth of field, focus, or perspective.
The kind of ecological unity devised by Roger Barker connects strongly and consistently behavior and physical features of ordinary - and those not-so-ordinary settings in universities, labs, hospitals, etc.
These three basic attributes allow for a calculation of Occupancy Time (OT), the number of person-hours spent in the behavior setting.
Penetration (Pe) is the degree to which an inhabitant is involved in the setting and consists of six incremental zones, ranging from onlooker to leader.
Using these divisions, the average depth of penetration can be determined for population subgroups (e.g., frequency of minority students being leaders in a club).
It is computed from the prior attributes using the following formula: (ΣPe + ΣAP + ΣBM)OT/100 Pressure is the degree to which external forces act upon a person to approach/enter or avoid/withdraw from the setting.