REGULAR ARTICLE Ecological Psychology and Social Psychology: It is Holt, or Nothing! Eric P. Charles # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract What is the greatest contribution that ecological psychologists can offer social psychology? Ideally, ecological psychologists could explain how people directly perceive the unique properties of their social partners. But social partners are distinguished from mundane objects because they possess mental traits, and tradition tells us that minds cannot be seen. When considering the ideal possibility, we reject that doctrine and posit minds as perceivable. For ecological psychology, this entails asserting that minds are the types of things able to structure ambient energy. Contemporary research and theory suggests distinctly ecological ways of attacking this problem, but the problem is not new. Almost 100 years ago, Holt argued for the visibility of minds. Thus when considering these ideas, ecological psychologists face a choice that is at once about their future and their past. Extending ecological psychology’ s first principles into the social realm, we come to the point where we must either accept or reject Holt’ s arguments, and the wider context they bring. In doing so, we accept or reject our ability to study the uniquely social. Keywords Ecological psychology . Social psychology . Edwin Bissell Holt . James J. Gibson . New realism . Direct perception . Embodied cognition Ecological psychology, founded through the work of James J. Gibson, can be viewed as a development and extension of the work of Edwin Bissell Holt (Gibson 1967a; Heft 2001). 1 A reexamination of this historical legacy may provide insights for ecological psychology, including hints at what will be necessary to make a deep Integr Psych Behav DOI 10.1007/s12124-010-9125-8 1 Both Holt and Gibson produced a large body of work, and so any comparison must either demarcate the specific points in their careers being focused on, or discuss their views in a more general sense. Here I will focus on the work produced in the middle of Holt’ s career, from approximately 1910 to 1916, and the “ecological” phase of Gibson’ s career, from 1961 onward. E. P. Charles (*) Division of Education, Humanities, and Social Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Dr., Altoona, PA 16601, USA e-mail: epc2@psu.edu