Social affordances emerge from the coupling between the behavioral and cognitive capacities of a given organism and the objective properties of its environment.
The wooden bench is in that case no more than a piece of wood with no further meaning.” Affordance is a term introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson.
In his 1979 book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception", he writes: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.
It implies the complementarily of the animal and the environment”[4] Possibilities for motor action — or what Gibson[5] termed affordances — depend on the match between environmental conditions and actors’ physical characteristics.
[15] Social affordance is at first used in Computer Supported Collaboration Learning experiments.
Computer support collaboration learning applications and users’ interactions are the major issue in social affordance.
It later expands its usage to any social interaction between computer related applications and its users.
Evaluations of social affordances in websites have focused on some of the following features: Tagging, User Profiles, Activity Streams, Comments, Ratings and Votes.