Affordances and Risk
J. J. Gibson was first to use the term ‘affordance’ to refer to the actional properties that exists between the world and the person. Affordances don’t happen inside the person or the object but between the object and what it tells the person. We only know what to do with an object because we have learned its affordance. If you have never seen an object before than it is unlikely you will know its affordance. This was demonstrated well in the video The Gods Must Be Crazy (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/). Released in 1980 as a comedy, it demonstrates what happens when bushmen discover a glass bottle that falls from the sky.
An affordance is what an object ‘offers’ a subject.
In our studies on Enactivism, our first homework activity has been to show to the group an object that requires unique knowledge of what that object demands. I got the discussion started by showing everyone online this object:
I asked everyone in the group what it was and how it was used. Of the 50 or so people from all over the globe, no-one knew what this was for. Similarly, it was not the type of object one could work out by intuition. This is not a problem because this object is really only useful to a guitar player. The object is used to wind the tuning nut on the guitar when re-stringing. It saves the twisting motion of thumb and forefinger turning many times to tighten a guitar string. And, if you have six or twelve strings, it can come in handy and save time and strain.
It is simply called ‘a guitar string winder’. These days there are battery operated ones that are more efficient.
You can see a tutorial on such a device here: https://youtu.be/OQhbcr89qj0?si=RFSpaeP3s2ktapVn
The lesson is, that affordances are learned over time and that proficiency with any affordance takes: time, development, recognition, adaptability, practice and then becomes embodied so it can be done in automaticity, that is, without cognition (thinking).
Most of the way human persons interact with their world is through affordance. It is how we do 95% of all things unconsciously. Most decision-making we use to over through the world in life is unconscious.
If you get in a new environment and have not been taught or coached what to do or the ergonomics of an object is foreign, you won’t be able to interact well with its affordance.
I had a friend the other day who had to hire a car from the airport for the first time and was given the keys to the vehicle and some brief instructions. When he got into the car, he couldn’t work out how to start it. He sat there for 10 minutes trying to work it out through simple problem-solving trial and error but had no success. In the end, he had to go back to the counter and ask for help. A kind person then walked him out to the car and showed him the simple process of how to start the car and then some other little ‘tricks to know’ that were not intuitive to those who have only driven petrol operated vehicles. Some of those little ‘tricks’ had major safety implications.
The trouble is, when we know an affordance we assume that everyone else has the same knowledge. We assume the myth of ‘common sense’. There is no such thing (https://safetyrisk.net/you-dont-believe-in-common-sense/) and, the myth of belief in common sense can be a dangerous thing. Assumptions of what other’s know can be dangerous. It’s why he have inductions and toolbox talks. But sadly, both of these are rarely done well.
The key to understanding affordances is that they are unseen, unconscious and embodied.
Affordances are found in the physical, social, semiotic and textual worlds and if you don’t know what one is, the temptation is like HOP, to just call it ‘dumb’. It couldn’t possibly be that there is an affordance I don’t understand. All systems require multiple on multiple affordances if one is to enact them efficiently. Understanding affordance is the foundation for understanding enactivism (https://safetyrisk.net/embodied-mental-health-risks/). Just because something doesn’t make sense to one, doesn’t mean its automatically ‘dumb’.
The label of ‘dumb’ should be avoided as much as possible. It is most often an expression of a lack of mature understanding of something or a moral/political projection on another. One thing is for sure, it is not dumb to the person enacting it. The language of ‘dumb’ in the end just becomes a barrier to relationships and listening. Similarly, anchoring risk to Jenga blocks is just swiss—cheese semiotics applied to linear causality.
You can read up more on affordances here:
https://safetyrisk.net/holistic-ergonomics-and-affordances/
https://safetyrisk.net/safety-silences-in-culture-affordances/
https://safetyrisk.net/curriculum-and-bodies-of-knowledge-as-instructional-affordances/
https://monoskop.org/images/2/2c/Gibson_James_J_1977_The_Theory_of_Affordances.pdf
Prof. Robert Long
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Thanks Rob, great blog as well as face to face discussions with you yesterday and over breakfast this morning. I am always amazed how many people use the words “well it is common sense”, or “what was the person thinking to do such a stupid thing”.
Thanks Brian, just the tip of the iceberg. Much more to come over the coming weeks.
A thought-provoking piece, Robert. Grounding human-environment interaction in Gibson’s affordances is a helpful counter to the outdated myth of “common sense.” However, there is a subtle but critical logical leap here that deserves deeper scrutiny.
Conflating procedural motor automaticity with decision-making—and anchoring it to a specific, and rarely sourced, percentage —risks reducing the human being to a passive stimulus-response machine.
While low-level sensory habits and spatial recognition are undeniably automated to conserve cognitive bandwidth, true decision-making relies on executive consciousness, metacognition, and reflective judgment. Throughout history—from classical metaphysics (Al-Ghazali’s distinction between habitual perception and governing intellect, or ‘Aql) to modern neurobiology—human agency is defined precisely by our capacity to override environmental conditioning, evaluate ambiguity, and exercise intentional choice.
When we treat Gibson’s visual perception theory as an absolute law of human consciousness, we introduce two distinct operational risks:
The Agency Trap: Reducing human action to unconscious habit strips the operator of intellectual agency and moral capacity, turning workers into simple automatons reacting to physical prompts.
The Design Vacuum: If affordances are treated as purely subjective, unquantifiable phenomena, system designers are left without a structured, empirical methodology to audit and re-engineer brittle environments.
Affordances are not absolute facts; they are environmental prompts that interact with a conscious, reflective human operator. The real objective of safety science isn’t just to lament unlearned affordances—it is to build rigorous diagnostic frameworks that uncover latent systemic traps and engineer environments where the safe path aligns naturally with human intellect and operational reality.
Hi Mansour, thanks for your response. Affordances are just a small part of the way humans enact in the unconscious space. There are also many other factors that couple with affordance in the way humans enact in the world. So, Gibson’s work is just a small part of a bigger picture in tackling the wicked problem of consciousness. Work by many like Damasio, Johnson, Fuchs etc demonstrate that we know so little of human Enactivism and consciousness in general. So, I don’t take Gibson’s theory as absolute but rather one small contribution to the larger challenges of Enactivism. I think there is a balance as you assert between: human agency, intellectual agency, moral capacity, subjective experience, inter-affectivity, inter-corporeality and the phenomenology of human being. We may disagree on you final sentence. I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘safety science’. I see most of what safety believes as acts of faith. So much of what is asserted about human persons is mechanistic and infused with unquestioned philosophical assumptions about an ethic of personhood and risk. Neither is any of this ‘objective’ indeed, I see the fixation by Safety on engineering and systems part of the problem about how safety demonises persons. The current emphasis on so called ‘safety science’ places so much confidence in the nature of semiotic models not on evidence at all. eg. risk matrices, swiss-cheese. These intellectual affordances are rarely challenged or if you do challenge them you get demonsied as anti-safety. Happy to chat off line.