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november 14, 2004

Fritz Heider & Mary-Ann Simmel "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior": hur vi tillskriver object mänskliga egenskaper

Via en mailinglista stötte jag på Frits Heider och Mary-Ann Simmels experiment kring hur vi tillskriver objekt mänskliga attribut och attribut såsom orsak och verkan. De visade en film med enkla grafiska symboler (t.ex. trianglar och cirklar) som försökspersonerna tillskrev antropomorfiska beteenden. Papret - som jag inte fått tag på - är Heider, F. & Simmel, M. (1944): "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior". American Journal of Psychology 57: 243-59.

Det jag främst blev nyfiken på var vilken "handling" det var i filmen. Efter lite inledande presentation länkas sedan till några sådana filmer, och därefter följer några fler referenser. Jag vet dock inte om någon av filmerna är exakt som originalexperimentets film.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Folk Psychology as a Theory:
Since at least the 1940s social psychologists have been interested in our capacity to attribute mental states to others. In an important early study, Heider and Simmel showed subjects a short movie which consisted of geometric shapes moving on a screen (Heider & Simmel 1944). When asked to report what they saw, almost every subject attributed propositional attitudes to the shapes, suggesting the existence of a universal and largely automatic capacity for propositional attitude attribution. In subsequent decades, social psychologists explored the accuracy and limitations of this capacity.

Här är några filmer samt kommentarer:
Michael J. Black: heider.mov :
As with facial expressions and articulated motions, I think motion is an important cue for understanding human behavior. Consider this short animated clip (download movie) that is based on the film by Heider and Simmel (1944). The motion of the objects is the primary source of information in this clip. Most people construct very similar stories about what is happening in the movie and this suggests that we have very strong models of motion and action that we use to explain our world.

Warren Thorngate, kursen Psychology 2100: Introduction to Social Psychology: Heider and Simmel film and story telling:
In the mid 1940s, Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel constructed a simple film animation similar to the one shown below. They asked observers to describe what they saw in the film. Most observers developed elaborate stories about the circle and the little triangle being in love, about the big-bad grey triangle trying to steal away the circle, about the blue triangle fighting back, yelling to his love to escape into the house, and following her inside where they embraced and lived happily ever after.

Notice how much such stories go beyond what was seen: two triangles and a circle moving around the screen!
(Jämför med Walter Michotte's demonstrations of causal attributions (a test of David Hume's ideas)

Paul Morris, Margaret Fidler, and Alan Costall: Beyond Anecdotes: An Empirical Study of "Anthropomorphism"
Our study is modeled on a classic study by Heider & Simmel (1944) demonstrating the immediacy and consistency of people's descriptions of social behavior. In their study, they constructed a simple cartoon film of geometrical shapes (triangles and squares) in which they attempted to convey actions such as chasing, and emotions such as anger, in the way these shapes moved about. Despite the simplicity of the display, and the open-ended instructions merely to "write down what happened in the picture," observers not only described the movements in psychological terms, but also showed remarkable agreement in the meanings of these movements.

En lite längre beskrivning och diskussion förs i Dennis Schofields avhandling The Second Person: A Point of View? - The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in Narrative Prose Fiction:
kapitel 1, avsnittet 4. An Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour
Heider and Simmel's objective in "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour" (1944) is to demonstrate the usefulness of such an endlessly variable animation as a tool in the investigation of "the perception of the behaviour of persons" (Heider and Simmel, 1944: 251). They also propose, more tentatively, that the method may help explore our habit of attributing causality to behaviour and of arranging behaviour into connected sequences - specifically into coherent, causally motivated stories. Given that their object is "the behaviour of persons," Heider and Simmel allow themselves the assumption that their subjects will readily interpret the changes in the field - realised in the mind of the viewers as the movement of shapes"in terms of actions of animated beings" (Heider and Simmel, 1944: 259). For instance, virtually all their subjects regard the rectangle's moving segment as a door, and do so, Heider and Simmel argue, because it moves only when T, t or c are in contact with it. They also assume that these actions will be interpreted in terms of logically connected sequences of behaviour that are likely to be unified into a coherent story.

För ett halvår sedan skrevs ett paper som antyder att vi är hårdkodade till sådant beteende (har dock inte läst/förstått hela detta paper).
Andrea S. Heberlein, Ralph Adolphs: Impaired spontaneous anthropomorphizing despite intact perception and social knowledge
Abstract:
Humans spontaneously imbue the world with social meaning: we see not only emotions and intentional behaviors in humans and other animals, but also anger in the movements of thunderstorms and willful sabotage in crashing computers. Converging evidence supports a role for the amygdala, a collection of nuclei in the temporal lobe, in processing emotionally and socially relevant information. Here, we report that a patient with bilateral amygdala damage described a film of animated shapes (normally seen as full of social content) in entirely asocial, geometric terms, despite otherwise normal visual perception. Control tasks showed that the impairment did not result from a global inability to describe social stimuli or a bias in language use, nor was a similar impairment observed in eight comparison subjects with damage to orbitofrontal cortex. This finding extends the role of the amygdala to the social attributions we make even to stimuli that are not explicitly social and, in so doing, suggests that the human capacity for anthropomorphizing draws on some of the same neural systems as do basic emotional responses.

Posted by hakank at november 14, 2004 10:25 FM Posted to Kognitiva illusioner

Comments

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at november 16, 2004 06:46 EM

Posted by: Håkan Kjellerstrand at november 21, 2004 09:42 FM