The Psychology Book

by DK

  Performance skills

  Goffman believes that in real life, everyone has the ability to choose their own stage, props, and costumes to display to the audience. The main goal of both the social actor and the onstage actor is to maintain a sense of coherence through interactions with other actors. This can only be achieved when everyone agrees upon the “definition of the situation,” and on the characteristics, expectations, and limitations of a particular performance or interaction, signaling to each other the appropriate ways of reacting and fitting into the social setting.

  To be in proper accord, people must agree on their personal identities, the social context, and the collective expectations of behavior within that context. For example, celebrities attending an elite party have all implicitly agreed to understand that they are “celebrities at an elite party;” each will accept their defined role in that situation and encourage other actors and observers (or audience members) alike to accept this definition. However, if the particular definition of the situation becomes discredited—for instance, if the food at the party turns out to be nothing more special than pizza, or there are noncelebrities also in attendance—there is a tendency for people to pretend that nothing has changed, thereby encouraging an artificial sense of believability in order to keep the peace or to avoid embarrassment.

  Goffman himself was said to enjoy testing the limits of the rules that shaped encounters in restaurants, lecture theaters, and movie theater lines.

  Hotel staff are “front stage” when they are interacting with the public. Their behavior may change, becoming less formal, when they are not on duty “backstage.”

  ERVING GOFFMAN

  Erving Goffman, a Canadian sociologist and writer, was born in Mannville, Alberta. His ancestors were Ukrainian Jews who had emigrated to Canada. Goffman gained a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology at the University of Toronto, then obtained a master’s and PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1962, he was made a full professor at the University of California, and by 1969 had published seven significant books. Tragedy struck in 1964 when his first wife committed suicide; Goffman wrote about this experience in his 1969 paper, The Insanity of Place. In 1981, he married again, and in 1982—despite being seen as something of a maverick—became president of the American Sociological Association. He died of stomach cancer just a few months later.

  Key works

  1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

  1961 Asylums

  1971 Relations in Public

  1974 Frame Analysis

  See also: William James • William Glasser • Stanley Milgram • David C. McClelland • Walter Mischel

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Familiarity

  BEFORE

  1876 German experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner suggests familiarity increases positive feeling toward art objects, but “supersaturation” leads to aversion.

  1910 Edward B. Titchener documents the mere exposure effect, describing it as a “glow of warmth” that people experience in the presence of familiar things.

  AFTER

  1971 Psychologists T.T. Faw and D. Pien find that adults and children prefer unfamiliar line drawings and patterns to familiar ones.

  1989 Robert Bornstein finds that the mere exposure effect is strongest when unfamiliar stimuli are presented briefly.

  Until the middle of the 20th century, social scientists tended to base their explanations of human behavior on environmental factors. However, the Polish-born psychologist Robert Zajonc believed that to develop a more complete understanding, it is necessary to take into account the functions of the mind as well. Zajonc’s main interest was in the relationship between feeling and thought—the intersection of emotion and cognition—and he devoted much of his career toward exploring which of these factors has a stronger influence on behavior. To this end, he performed a seminal experiment in 1968 that led to his discovery of the “mere exposure effect,” which is arguably his best-known contribution to the field of social psychology.

  "Novelty is commonly associated with uncertainty and conflict—states that are more likely to produce negative than positive affect."

  Robert Zajonc

  Familiarity experiments

  Mere exposure, Zajonc explained, simply refers to a condition in which the given stimulus is accessible to the subject’s perception, either consciously or subconsciously. The effects of mere exposure had been documented previously by the psychologist Edward B. Titchener who, in 1910, described the “glow of warmth” and feeling of intimacy that a person experiences in the presence of something familiar. However, Titchener’s hypothesis was rejected at the time, and the idea faded into relative obscurity.

  Zajonc’s interest in the effect was aroused by a newspaper article that described a curious experiment that took place at Oregon State University in 1967. The article stated that a “mysterious student” had been attending class for two months, enveloped in a black bag. The professor, Charles Goetzinger, knew the identity of the person inside, but none of the class had any idea who it might be. Goetzinger then observed the class to gauge their reactions over time. Initially, the students treated the black bag with hostility, but this softened in time and they were eventually friendly and even protective toward the person in the bag. Goetzinger noted that the students’ attitude gradually “changed from hostility toward the black bag to curiosity and finally to friendship.”

  Zajonc’s groundbreaking paper, Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure, was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968. Zajonc’s paper describes a series of experiments in which he showed participants a sequence of random images—geometric shapes, Chinese symbols, paintings, and pictures of faces—that were flashed in front of them so rapidly that they were unable to discern which were shown repeatedly. When subjects were later asked which images they preferred, they consistently chose the ones to which they had been most frequently exposed, although they were not consciously aware of this fact. What Zajonc seemed to have discovered was that familiarity brings about an attitude change, breeding affection or some form of preference for the familiar stimulus. This increases with exposure: the greater your number of exposures to something, the more affection you will feel toward it. To put it simply, “the more you see it, the more you like it.”

  Researchers into the mere exposure phenomenon since Zajonc’s experiment have found that it is even possible to re-create this effect using sound rather than images. In 1974, the social psychologist D.W. Rajecki used fertile chicken eggs as test subjects, playing tones of different frequencies to different groups of eggs before they hatched, and then playing these tones to both groups of chicks again after hatching. Without exception, the chicks preferred the tones that had been played to them prenatally.

  Zajonc’s 1968 experiment tested the mere exposure effect by showing people slides of symbols with uneven rates of repetition; the more frequently someone saw a symbol, the more they claimed to like it.

  Preferences are not rational

  Zajonc’s findings indicate that this preference for familiar things is based purely on the history of exposure to it, and is not affected by a person’s expressed personal beliefs or attitudes. This holds true even when exposures take place only on the subliminal level, when subjects are completely unaware that they are being presented with a stimulus. This discovery led to Zajonc’s claim that “preferences need no inferences,” meaning that affectionate feeling is not based on reasoned judgement. This is contrary to what most of us might imagine to
be the case.

  In a paper called Feeling and Thinking, written in 1980, Zajonc argued that feelings and thoughts are actually very independent of one another. Feelings not only precede thoughts during a person’s complex response to a stimulus, but are actually the most powerful determinants of a person’s attitudes and decisions. This paper was widely debated, and it helped to bring the study of emotion back to the forefront of Western psychology, in part because the theory bears important implications for the study of decision-making processes. It suggests that, contrary to what we may believe, it is not reason and logic that guide our decisions; in fact, we make fast, instinctive, emotion-based decisions before we have even had a chance to consider the choice cognitively—we make judgments without information. If this is true, it follows that our logical reasoning merely justifies and rationalizes the decisions we have already made, rather than actually serving to inform the choice in the first place.

  Zajonc concludes that “affect is always present as a companion to thought, whereas the converse is not true for cognition.” We can never think about something without a feeling attached; as Zajonc says, we do not just see “a house,” we see “a handsome house” or “a pretentious house.” Every perception we have contains some affect, or feeling. The primacy of affect over cognition is also apparent in memory, he says, as Frederick Bartlett noted in his book, Remembering: “When a subject is being asked to remember, very often the first thing that emerges is something of the nature of attitude.”

  Interpersonal attraction

  The impact of the mere exposure effect extends beyond the confines of the laboratory, and out into the area of interpersonal attraction. In this context, the phenomenon is referred to as the “propinquity effect,” the way we tend to form friendships or romantic relationships with people we see regularly. One explanation for this focuses on evolution: when animals are exposed to something for the first time, they often respond with fear and aggression, but repeated exposures—during which the animal realizes the perceived threat does not materialize—lead to a reduction in negative responses. Zajonc explored this notion further with human subjects, discovering that people form very negative attitudes toward an imaginary group of unfamiliar people, attributing unpleasant qualities to them for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are complete strangers. However, as with shapes and symbols, repeated exposure is shown to increase trust and affection.

  Another explanation for the propinquity effect focuses on the many factors involved in interpersonal attraction, which include familiarity, similarity of attitudes, physical attraction, and reciprocal affection. Frequent interactions between people may not only increase the level of familiarity, but also provide an increasing impression of similarity, thereby breeding positive feelings and ultimately attraction.

  "The form of experience that we came to call “feeling” accompanies all cognitions."

  Robert Zajonc

  Exposure and advertising

  Advertising is another arena in which the mere exposure effect plays a crucial role, although the picture here is less clear. Research seems to suggest that repeated exposure to a brand or corporate name would boost sales, but this assumption is evidently overly simplistic, as it doesn’t take into account other possible effects of frequent exposure.

  One study used banner ads to test the mere exposure effect on college-aged students. Subjects were presented with an article to read on a computer screen while banner ads flashed along the top of the screen. The results indicated that those who had been exposed more frequently to the banner ads did indeed rate the ads more favorably than those who had seen it less frequently or not at all. However, another study found that familiarity with a brand name can create an ambivalent attitude. This may be because people have both good and bad associations with familiar companies, and all of these associations are brought to mind with frequent exposure, leading to greater ambivalence. As a result, it is unclear whether mere familiarity, created through repeated advertising, is good for sales.

  Repeated exposure to a brand can create a liking for it, even when it is presented without any factual information and requires no decision-making from the person viewing it.

  "The advertising industry has always attributed to exposure formidable advertising potential."

  Robert Zajonc

  Familiar faces

  Zajonc found that not only does exposure influence how a person feels about someone, but it can even change the way a person looks over time. With a group of colleagues, he conducted a study to find out whether the faces of spouses appear more similar after 25 years together. They compared photographs of couples taken during their first year of marriage with those taken 25 years later, and found that couples looked more alike after many years of being together. After ruling out several other potential explanations, the researchers decided that empathy was the most likely cause. Time had increased the couple’s empathy for each other, and since human emotion is communicated through facial expressions, they may have begun to mimic each others’ expressions in the process of empathizing, resulting in similar wrinkle patterns over time.

  Known for the breadth of his work on the basic processes of social behavior, Zajonc helped to create the modern field of social psychology. He used his work on thought and feeling to explore issues such as racism, genocide, and terrorism, hoping that research could ultimately help to prevent war and human suffering.

  Couples grow to resemble each other over time because they express empathy through reflecting each other’s facial expressions; this leads to the formation of similar facial lines.

  ROBERT ZAJONC

  Robert Zajonc was born in Lodz, Poland. When he was 16 his family fled to Warsaw during the Nazi invasion of Poland. Two weeks later, their building was bombed and both of his parents were killed. He spent six months recuperating in a hospital, after which he was arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to a German labor camp. He escaped with two other prisoners and walked 200 miles (320km) to France only to be recaptured and imprisoned again. He broke out for a final time and made his way to the UK.

  After World War II, Zajonc moved to the US, where he established himself as an eminent psychologist, gaining psychology degrees to PhD level at the University of Michigan. He worked there until his retirement in 1994, when he became an emeritus professor at Stanford University. Zajonc died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85.

  Key works

  1968 Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure

  1975 Birth Order and Intellectual Development

  1980 Feeling and Thinking

  See also: Leon Festinger • Edward B. Titchener • Stanley Schachter

  IN CONTEXT

  APPROACH

  Gender studies

  BEFORE

  1961 Albert Bandura develops social learning theory, which suggests that boys and girls behave differently because they are treated differently.

  1970 Robert Helmreich and Elliot Aronson publish a study showing that men find competent men more likeable than incompetent ones.

  AFTER

  1992 US psychologist Alice Eagly finds that women are evaluated more negatively when they display leadership in a traditionally masculine way.

  2003 Simon Baron-Cohen suggests the female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy, whereas the male brain is hardwired for understanding systems.

  Until the women’s liberation movement took hold in the 1970s, Janet Taylor Spence’s research had focused primarily on anxiety. However, after reading a study conducted by two of her colleagues ab
out how competence in men correlated with likeability, the American psychologist turned to issues relating to gender. Noticing that the study did not consider the female gender, she decided to conduct a similar study that focused entirely on women. The resulting paper—Who likes competent women?—was published in 1972.

  Working with Robert Helmreich, Taylor Spence set out to test whether men and women preferred competent women to incompetent ones. The two psychologists suspected that only people who believed in sexual equality would prefer competence. To test their hypothesis, they designed the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, which assesses attitudes toward the roles and rights of women by asking questions about education, marriage, professional life, habits, intellectual leadership, and social and economic freedom. The results were surprising. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, subjects not only preferred more competent to less competent women, but even awarded the highest ratings to the women who were competent in stereotypically masculine ways.

  This landmark study was seminal in launching gender research as a subcategory within the field of social psychology.

  "Even our conservative subjects… rated highest the woman who was competent in stereotypically masculine areas."

  Janet Taylor Spence

  See also: Sigmund Freud • Guy Corneau • Eleanor E. Maccoby • Albert Bandura • Simon Baron-Cohen