Psy 313: Quotations

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Active Construction:

These writers are bent on showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure products of experience; and experience is supposed to be of something simply given...regards the creature as absolutely passive clay upon which experience rains down.  The clay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fall thickest, and so the final shape of the mind is moulded...for experience, the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and the order of its items must end by being exactly reflected by the passive mirror which we call the sentient organism. . .

. . . These writers have, then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its weighty index finger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess.  The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than is made by it.
    James, 1890, p. 403
 

If I say that I see a book before me on my desk, I shall be criticized, because nobody can see a "book." ...Even the character of being an "object," or "thing," which I have tacitly attributed to the experiences I have called "book" and "desk," is improper in correct psychological description...we must learn to make the all-important distinction between sensation and perception, between the bare sensory material actually given to us and the host of other items which since childhood have become associated with it. You cannot see a book, I am told, since this term involves some knowledge about a class of objects to which this specimen belongs, and about their use, etc, whereas in pure seeing such knowledge cannot enter...Objects cannot exist for us before sensory experience has become imbued with meaning.
    Köhler, 1930, pp. 54-55
 

Evaluation of other persons, important as it is in our existence, is largely automatic, one of the things we do without knowing very much about the "principles " in terms of which we operate.  Regardless of the degree of skill which an adult may have in appraising others, he engages in the process most of the time without paying much attention to how he does it.
    Tagiuri, 1958, p.ix
 
 

 Naïve Realism:

The psychologically naive, unreflective person lives in the belief that he experiences and observes other people in an objective, unbiased way.  He may have his doubts about the validity of certain explicit interpretations and judgments which he may perform with regard to other persons.  He may be suspicious of other people misleading and deceiving by words and acts.  However, he is not aware of the fact that certain processes [of misinterpretation] are at work within himself, which distort and falsify his experience of other people even on the level of immediate observation.  It remains concealed from him that what he considers as "facts" is permeated by--and partly the result of....unnoticed and unconscious but nevertheless systematically proceeding misinterpretations.
    Ichheiser, 1943, pp. 145-146
 
 

 The need for meaning:

attribution is a case of the organization of experiences and has its roots in the individual's pursuit of meaning, which has been discussed as a problem of social cognition in relation to standards of judgment and social values.  Some authors talk of a general tendency toward causal explanation, a "causal drive."  Oppenheimer (1922) considers it as a third basic drive beside the drives for self conservation and for the conservation of the species.
    Heider, 1958, p. 2
 

Without too much absurdity from a functionalistic point of view, a biogenic need for structure or meaning could be postulated and hostility to alien events be accounted for in terms of threat to the structure or meaning attached to the situation.  It is not necessary to posit the tendency to structure as a biological imperative, because, native or not, the making of some kind of sense out of a situation appears invariable and unquestionably essential to the prediction of recurrences and differences in the surrounding world.  To cope adequately with the environment, even to survive in it, seems to necessitate the ability to read it or define it in some degree of veridicality at least.  To satisfy even the simpler motives requires that the organism be able to see relevant means-ends relationships, that is, to be able to "know" what objects or stimuli are motive relevant and to be capable of delineating and engaging appropriate courses of action for their attainment.  One's conceptual system goes a long way toward embodying these essentials.
    Harvey, 1963, p. 3
 

With the doubt, therefore, the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends.  Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.  We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek not merely an opinion, but a true opinion.  But put this fancy to the test and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be false or true...That the settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry is a very important proposition.
    Peirce, 1877
 
 

 Perceptual Readiness:

We do not face stimulus situations involving other people or even the world of nature around us in an indifferent way; we are charged with certain modes of readiness, certain established norms, which enter to modify our reactions
    Sherif, 1936, p. 99
 

Categories vary in terms of their accessibility; the readiness with which a stimulus input with given properties will be coded or identified in terms of a category.  The relative accessibility of categories and systems of categories seems to depend upon two factors: the expectancies of the person with regard to the likelihood of events to be encountered in the environment; and the search requirements imposed on the organism by his needs and his ongoing enterprises . . . The likelihood that a sensory input will be categorized in terms of a given category is not only a matter of fit between sensory input and category specifications.  It depends also on the accessibility of a category.  To put the matter in an oversimplified way, given a sensory input with equally good fit to two nonoverlapping categories, the more accessible of the two categories would 'capture' the input
    Bruner, 1957, pp. 132-133

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The Person-Situation Interaction; Commerce in the Life-Space

“The individual is part of the surroundings, but he is a distinguishable, relatively segregated part…The organism is a biological unit whose internal activities tend toward a relation of equilibrium. To maintain these functions and their equilibrium the organism directs itself in the strongest way to the surroundings, engaging in a constant commerce with them...In the environment the organism seeks first a field of operations, a region in which it can move and act in accordance with its structure. It is sensitive to those aspects of the surroundings that are of prime relevance to its life functions. It is a well-known fact that different organisms direct themselves to very different aspects of the same environment, depending on their life tendencies.”
     Asch, 1952, pp. 44-45
 

“That a person will come to structure or make sense out of a personally relevant situation is one of psychology's most pervasive tenets....One's concepts or system of meaning serves as a transformer through which impinging events are coded and translated into psychological significance.  Without some such internal mediating system, the environing world would remain in a state of irrelevance; or the receiving person would move as a robot impelled solely by the physical attributes of the impingements.”
     Harvey, 1963, p. 3
 

“Socially established norms are not limited to shaping in us a set of aesthetic standards, or even to prescribing our relationships to other individuals; they have much to do in determining our perception of nature and our attitudes toward it.  What we shall notice in the external stimulus field, and what aspects of it will stand out, are largely a function of what we are prepared to see.  The socially established norms of a given period create in us lasting expectations and a preparedness to see in the nature that surrounds us much to which another period would be totally blind...even so intelligent a man as  Montesquieu limited his whole description of a trip from Rome to Munich to this statement: 'I made a very painful journey, half of the way in excessive heat, the other half in mortal cold, in the month of August, in the mountains of the Tyrol.'  All grandeur of these mountains and the beauty of Lake Konstanz among them, meant to him nothing.”
     Sherif, 1936, pp. 64-65
 
 

The Holistic Nature of Perception

"Instead of reacting to local stimuli by local and mutually independent events, the organism reacts to an actual constellation of stimuli by a total process which, as a functional whole, is its response to the whole situation. This is the only viewpoint which can explain how to a given local stimulus there may correspond altogether different experiences as soon as surrounding stimulation is changed."
     Köhler, 1930, pp. 80-81
 

“Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole...(it is) as recognizable as the activities of eating or drinking; like all activity it is stimulated by discomfort, and the particular discomfort concerned is called "doubt," just as hunger is the discomfort that stimulates eating and thirst is the discomfort that stimulates drinking…If inquiry begins in doubt, it terminates in the institution of conditions which remove the need for doubt.  The latter state of affairs may be designated by the words belief and knowledge.”      John Dewey

You listen to me now with certain prepossessions as to my competency, and these affect your reception of what I say, but were I suddenly to break off lecturing, and begin to sing "We won't go home till morning" in a rich baritone voice, not only would that new fact be added to your stock, but it would oblige you to define me differently.
     James, 1907, p. 74
 

It is known from the study of elementary perception that the parts of an integrated structure will tend either to look as much alike as possible, or to look as much unlike each other as possible...In social perception, the act is in many cases assimilated to the origin.  Acts or products are colored by the qualities of the person to whom they are ascribed...Contrast or dissimilation occurs when the origin is taken as the standard for judging the quality of the act.  We can assume that in these cases the fusion between act and origin is less complete and the act is perceived , so to speak, with the origin as background... Shakespeare makes use of this kind of contrast when he describes Othello as a person to whom jealousy is foreign.  If he had introduced Othello as as a man inclined to be jealous, his acts of jealousy would have lost much of their dramatic force.  Sophocles' Philoktetes offers a similar example. Philoktetes is presented as possessing a high degree of self-control.  That such a man cries out loud in pain is very impressive
     Heider, 1944, pp. 8-10
 

The mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same. This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.  We saw in Chapter X how the consciousness of personal identity reposed on it, the present thought finding in its memories a warmth and intimacy which it recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels.  This sense of identity of the knowing subject is held by some philosophers to be the only vehicle by which the world hangs together.  It seems hardly necessary to say that a sense of identity of the known object would perform exactly the same unifying function, even if the sense of subjective identity were lost.  And without the intention to think of the same outer things over and over again, and the sense that we were doing so, our sense of our own personal sameness would carry us but a little way towards making a universe of our experience......we do not care whether there be any real sameness in things or not, or whether the mind be true or false in its assumptions of it.  Our principle only lays it down that the mind makes continual use of the notion of sameness, and if deprived of it, would have a different structure from what it has...The mind must conceive as possible that the same should be before it, for our experience to be the sort of thing it is.  Without the psychological sense of identity, sameness might rain down upon us from the outer world for ever and we be none the wiser.  With the psychological sense, on the other hand, the outer world might be an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive a repeated experience...The name which I have given to the principle, in calling it the law of constancy in our meanings, accentuates its subjective character, and justifies us laying it down as the most important of all the features of our mental structure.
     James, 1890, pp. 459-460

There is for every category of objects that has been established in the organism a stimulus input of sufficient duration and cue redundancy such that, if the stimulus input fits the specifications of the category, it will eventually be correctly perceived as an exemplar of that category.  With enough time and enough testing of defining of defining cues, such 'best fit' perceiving can be accomplished for most but not all classes of environmental events with which the person has contact.  There are some objects whose cues to identify are sufficiently equivocal so that no such resolution can be achieved, and these are mostly in the sphere of so-called interpersonal perception: perceiving the states of other people, their characteristics, intentions, etc. on the basis of external signs.  And since this is the domain where misperception can have the most chronic if not the most acute consequences, it is doubtful whether a therapeutic regimen of 'close looking' will aid the misperceiver much in dealing with the more complex cue patterns.  But the greatest difficulty rests in the fact that the cost of close looks is generally too high under the conditions of speed, risk, and limited capacity imposed upon organisms by the environment or their. The ability to use minimal cues quickly in categorizing the events of the environment is what gives the organism its lead time in adjusting to events.  Pause and close inspection inevitably cut down on this precial interval for adjustment .
     Bruner, 1957, pp. 141-142
 

The meaning of a thing, thus, is the placement of an object in a network of hypothetical inference concerning its other observable properties, its effects, and so on...All of this suggests, does it not, that veridicality is not so much a matter of representation as it is a matter of what I shall call model building. In learning to perceive, we are learning the relations that exist between the properties of objects and events that we encounter, learning appropriate categories and category systems, learning to predict and to check what goes with what.
     Bruner, 1957, p. 126
 

Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a "stunt" self imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons...We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas...The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions.
     James, 1907, p. 89
 

Our experience in life tends to form itself into clusters, and while we may call on the right cluster at the wrong time, or the wrong cluster at the right time, still the process in question dominates our entire mental life...Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories... categorization assimilates as much as it can to the cluster. There is a curious inertia in our thinking. We like to solve problems easily. We can do so best if we can fit them rapidly into a satisfactory category and use this category as a means of prejudging the solution
     Allport, 1954, p. 20

There is a curious inertia in our thinking. We like to solve problems easily. We can do so best if we fit them rapidly into a satisfactory category and use this category as a means of prejudging the solution...so long as we can 'get away' with coarse overgeneralizations we tend to do so. Why? Well, it takes less effort, and effort, except in the area of our most intense interests, is disagreeable.
     Allport, 1954, pp. 20-21
 

 The stream of our thought is like a river. On the whole, easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule. But at intervals a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.  If a real river could feel, it would feel these eddies and set-backs as places of effort.
     James, 1890, p. 451
 

Let us suppose that an individual or group expresses the same idea or preserves the same form of behavior in all circumstances.  This provides evidence of an undeniable conviction in what is said or done.  Such singleness of purpose, such confidence, never fails to make an impression or to attract others.  Everyone recognises that a consistent individual or group knows what it wants, will reject any concession to the majority, and will in no case give in to pressure...one feels constrained, if not to go along with them, then at least to consider what, in other circumstances, one would reject.
     Moscovici (1985)

Asch (1946, p. 258): We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story about a highly complex matter. We know that such impressions form with remarkable rapidity and great ease...we can no more prevent its rapid growth than we can avoid perceiving a given visual object or hearing a melody.
 

Heider (1944, pp. 358-359): the origin [of some effect, such as a behavior] and the change which is attributed to the origin form a unit; that is to say, the change 'belongs' to the origin. The connection between origin and change is in many cases manifest and appears phenomenally as causal dependence: "The origin causes the change." Therefore, origin attribution is a case of 'phenomenal causality'...causal effects often play the role of data and can be thought of as proximal stimuli through which are mediated to us properties of  the origin which belong to the stable relevant psychological environment. Through causal integration changes or passing experiences are related to the framework of the invariant environment which gives the change its meaning....animate beings, especially persons, are the prototype of origins.
 

Heider (1944, pp. 358-361): When we see a color as belonging to an object, the color is perceived as a property of the object, and this object unit with its properties could be called a "pattern of qualities"....in the development of the child's causal thought 'the original union of doer and deed forms the schema according to which causal thought can develop.' The child has the conviction that all changes that concern me (actively or passively) are made to happen....That this tendency to perceive persons as origins influences social perception can be shown by many examples.  It can lead, for instance, to an underestimation of other factors responsible for the effect.  Changes in the environment are almost always caused by acts of persons in combination with other factors. The tendency exists to ascribe the changes entirely to persons" (p. 361)
 

 Heider (1958, pp. 44-46): Let us begin with the "chasing versus following" problem...[a film presents] two geometrical figures moving in the same direction, one a short distance behind the other...what are the conditions that determine whether chasing or following will be seen? Knowing that information from the environment must be mediated to the person through proximal stimuli, we first search for spatial-temporal properties of the mediation which distinguish those ordinal stimuli that produce the impression of chasing from those that do not. But our search keeps ending in blind alleys. No matter how much we attempt to take into account ever more inclusive stimulus patterns, we cannot find definite spatial-temporal features that are univocally related the phenomena in mind. This of course does not imply that we have to give up looking for figural relations in the stimulus pattern that produce a particular impression.  But it does suggest that the proximal stimulus pattern as geometrically defined, even in its widest sense of the local proximal stimulus plus its surroundings, is not sufficient to account for perception, that nonspatial-temporal conditions, namely, meanings as data, are part and parcel of the perceptual process...if one presents different motion picture scenes in which an obviously dangerous animal is shown with different persons, the impression that person A is more courageous than B might be produced by simple motions of approachment or withdrawal.  But one cannot say that motions of approachment or withdrawal, defined in a temporal and spatial way, are generally coordinated with these impressions.  Only when the level of meaning is included can a feature common to all the cases producing the impression "courageous" be found.  The meaning might be something like: going ahead or not withdrawing in spite of danger ahead.  Bear also in mind that in this case "going ahead" does not have to be defined spatially in the physical sense; it can be defined "hodologically," as doing something that is a condition for coming into contact.  The actions can be in social space.  Also "danger" cannot be defined figurally.

Spring Break

Ichheiser (1943, p. 151): the behavior of the individual is always determined by two groups of factors: by personal factors (attitudes, dispositions, etc.) and by situational factors. The situation plays its part in determining behavior in two ways: as a system of stimuli which provokes reactions, and as a system of opportunities for action (or
obstacles to action). We cannot understand the underlying motivation of behavior without taking into account the dynamics of the situation involved...the importance of situational factors is often greater than the importance of personal factors: individuals endowed with different traits (attitudes), nevertheless, behave in the same way in identical social situations.
 

Heider (1944, pp. 361-365): That [the] tendency to perceive persons as origins influences social perception can be shown by many examples. It can lead, for instance, to an underestimation of other factors responsible for the effect.  Changes in the environment are almost always caused by acts of persons in combination with other factors. The tendency exists to ascribe the changes entirely to persons...often the momentary situation which, at least in part, determines the behavior of a person is disregarded and the behavior is taken as a manifestation of personal
characteristics...a person who is seen as the origin of a bad act is usually judged to be bad himself...not the doing only but the doer [is] susceptible to a value judgment."
 

Heider (1958, pp. 54-55): It seems that behavior in particular has such salient properties it tends to engulf the total field rather than be confined to its proper position as a local stimulus whose interpretation requires the additional data of a surrounding field--the situation in social perception. The consequence is, as Brunswik has noted, ...'that two people show the tendency to seem to have the same personality if their momentary actions are the same, and the instigations to their actions are not sufficiently taken into account' (Brunswik, 1934, p. 218).

Bruner (1957, pp. 129-130): "The greater the accessibility of a category, (a) the less the input necessary for a categorization to occur, (b) the wider the range of characteristics that will be accepted as fitting the category.  (c) the more likely that categories that provide an equally good fit for the input will be masked.  To put it in more ordinary language: Apples will be more easily and swiftly recognized; a wider range of things will be identified or misidentified as Apples, and in consequence the correct or best fitting identity of these other inputs will be masked.  This is what is intended by accessibility."
 

Bruner (1957, p. 132): "the likelihood that a sensory input will be categorized in terms of a given category is not only a matter of fit between sensory input and category specifications.  It depends also on the accessibility of a category.  To put the matter in an oversimplified way, given a sensory input with equally good fit to two nonoverlapping categories, the more accessible of the two categories would 'capture' the input."
 

Bruner (1957, p. 132): "In short, the accessibility of categories I employ for identifying the objects of the world around me must not only reflect the environmental probabilities of objects that fit these categories, but also reflect the search requirements imposed by my needs, my ongoing activities, my defenses, etc."
 

James (1890): "The object we wish to capture with our attention may be very weak, a small noise in the midst of a crowd, and the way not to miss it is to prepare for it by either rehearsing it mentally or actually coming into contact with an exemplar.  In doing so, this preparation partly consists of the creation of an imaginary duplicate of the object in the mind, which shall stand ready to receive the outward impression...When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed for or dreaded sound.  So of an awaited footstep.  Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers...the image in the mind is the attention; the preperception is half of the perception of the looked for thing.  It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern."

Allport (1954): "Our experience in life tends to form itself into clusters, and while we may call on the right cluster at the wrong time, or the wrong cluster at the right time, still the process in question dominates our entire mental life...Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be reacted into old categories... categorization assimilates as much as it can to the cluster. There is a curious inertia in our thinking. We like to solve problems easily. We can do so best if we can fit them rapidly into a satisfactory category and use this category as a means of prejudging the solution...Life is so short, and the demands placed upon us for practical adjustments so great, that we cannot let our ignorance detain us in our daily transactions. We have to decide whether objects are good or bad by classes. We cannot weigh each object in the world by itself. Rough and ready rubrics, however coarse and broad, have to suffice...[Stereotypes] facilitate perception and conduct...[they] make our adjustment to life speedy, smooth, and consistent."
 

Tajfel (1969, p. 82): " As the late Gordon Allport pointed out, stereotypes arise from a process of categorization. They introduce simplicity and order where there is complexity and nearly random variation...In each relevant situation we shall achieve as much stereotyped simplification as we can without doing unnecessary violence to the facts. But there is good evidence that even when facts do turn against us and destroy the useful and comfortable distinctions, we still find ways to preserve the general content of our categories.
 

Devine (1989, p. 6):
"The present model assumes that...because the stereotype has been frequently activated in the past, it is a well-learned set of associations that is automatically activated in the presence of a member (or symbolic equivalent) of the target group.  The model holds that this unintentional activation is equally strong and equally inescapable for high-and low- prejudice persons....automatic processes involve the unintentional activation of some well-learned set of associations or responses that have been developed through repeated activation in memory.  They do not require conscious effort  and appear to be initiated by the presence of stimulus cues in the environment.  A crucial component of automatic processes is their inescapability; they occur despite deliberate attempts to bypass or ignore them.  In contrast, controlled processes are intentional and require the active attention of the individual...Before inhibition of automatically activated responses can occur, there has to be enough time and cognitive capacity available for the conscious expectancy to develop...low-prejudice persons have decided that the stereotype is an inappropriate basis for behavior or evaluation and experience a conflict between the automatically activated stereotype and the personal beliefs...Because the stereotype has a longer history of activation than the newly acquired personal beliefs, overt nonprejudiced responses require intentional inhibition of the automatically activated stereotype and activation of the newer personal belief structure.  Such inhibition and initiation of new responses involves controlled processes."