Abstract
Human action unfolds through movement, and how that movement is organized can itself reveal psychological information about the person producing it. I use social microstructure to refer specifically to patterned organization within unfolding movement that bears systematically on socially relevant characteristics or processes of the person producing it. The purpose of this paper is to develop social microstructure as a perspective for expanding the psychological questions we ask through the examination of movement. Doing so means treating social microstructure as a topic of inquiry and asking what psychological questions become possible when the organization within movement is related systematically to the person producing it. Advances in computer vision, machine learning, and related computational methods now make increasingly rich representations of unfolding human movement available for such analysis. I pursue several questions opened by this perspective, including how different representations derived from recorded movement preserve psychologically relevant organization, how social microstructure may change across development, and what organization within self-generated and socially relevant movement might contribute to our understanding of the self and social functioning. Across these directions is a common question: what can be learned about the person from variation within the unfolding of an action itself?