Our Visual Perception May Actually be Biased in ways that
help Motivate us to get out of harm's way, One of the new researches on our mind reveals this. When
we're faced with things that seem threatening, whether it's a hairy spider or
an angry mob, our goal is usually to get as far away as we can. Now, new
research suggests that our visual perception may actually be biased in ways
that help motivate us to get out of harm's way.
Our bodies help us respond to threats by engaging our
fight-or-flight response and enabling us to act quickly: Our heart rate and
blood pressure ramp up, and we produce more of the stress hormone cortisol. But
research suggests that the body may also demonstrate its preparedness through
certain perceptual biases.
Inaccordance with the threat-signal hypothesis,
psychological scientist Emily Balcetis of New York University and colleagues
reasoned that if we need to be increasingly prepared to act as a threat gets
closer, then we're best served by misperceiving objects as being closer to us
the more threatening they are.
Importantly, this hypothesis suggests that we should
misperceive threatening objects as closer than nonthreatening objects that
evoke equally strong and negative responses, such as disgust.
The researchers tested this hypothesis in two studies
reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
Psychological Science.
In the first study, Balcetis and colleagues recruited 101
college students to participate in a study supposedly about attitudes toward
"island life." After entering the room, the students stood 156 inches
away from a live tarantula that was placed on a tray on a table. The students
reported how threatened and disgusted they felt at that moment and estimated
the distance to the tarantula.
The results showed that the more threatened participants
felt, the closer they estimated the tarantula to be. But a different effect
emerged when considering the effect of disgust. The more disgusted they felt,
the further away they estimated the tarantula to be.
To pinpoint the specific effect of threat, the
researchers conducted a second study in which they experimentally manipulated
participants' experiences of threat and disgust and compared the effects to a
case when they felt no emotions.
They recruited 48 female college students to participate
in a study on "impressions." When they arrived, the participants met
a male student they had never seen before (the male student was actually in on
the experiment).
Each participant was randomly assigned to watch one of
three videos. Participants in the threat condition watched a video in which the
male student talked about his love of guns, how he hunted as a hobby, and how
he experienced feelings of pent-up aggression.
Participants in the disgust condition watched a video in
which the same male student talked about having done disgusting things to
customers' orders while working in a fast food restaurant, including urinating
in customers' sodas and spitting in their food.
Finally, participants in the neutral condition watched a
video in which the male student talked about the classes he was taking next
semester in a neutral manner.
After watching the video, the participants were brought
back into the room with the male student, who sat 132 inches away from them. To
get a measure of their physiological arousal, the researchers recorded each
participant's heart rate immediately before the interaction. The participants
rated how "threatening" and how "disgusting" they felt the
male student was at that moment. They also estimated how many inches separated
them from the male student.
The results showed that the female students who watched
the threatening video estimated that the male student was closer (average 55.0
cm) than the students who watched either the disgusting (average 78.4 cm) or
the neutral video (average 73.9 cm). This relationship held even after the
participants' heart rate was taken into account.
In both studies, feelings of threat -- but not disgust --
were related to participants' estimates of distance, providing further evidence
in support of the threat-signal hypothesis.
"Although fear and disgust are both negative and
intense emotions, they differ in the amount of immediate action they call
for," the researchers explain. "Both fear and disgust may be
associated with avoidance tendencies, but fear typically necessitates active
mobilization to withdraw from or dispel potential threats, whereas disgust does
not."
This research suggests that our perception can be biased
in ways that may help to promote functional action -- in this case, getting
away from sources of threat. But an important question remains: Does perceiving
objects as physically closer actually make us quicker to act?
Addressing questions like these will help paint a clearer
picture of how our experiences of emotion can guide action by shaping how we
perceive the environment around us.
Co-authors on this research include Shana Cole of New
York University and David Dunning of Cornell University.
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