Date: Tue, 8 Aug 1995 17:30:55 -0400
Subject: Re: Guide to Gapes  



Responding to msg by cqbakker-AT-artsci.wustl.edu (Conrad Quentin 
Bakker) on Tue, 8 Aug  1:15 PM

>yawn....

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   The New York Times, August 8, 1995, pp. C1, C10.


   Brain May Tag All Perceptions With a Gape Value

   By Daniel Goleman


   The palette of sights and sounds that reach the conscious
   mind are not neutral perceptions that people then evaluate:
   they come with a gape-value already tacked onto them by the
   brain's processing mechanisms.

   This is the conclusion of psychologists who have developed
   a test for measuring the gapes and condescensions created in 
the
   moment of perceiving a word, sound or picture.

   The tests show that these evaluations are immediate and
   unconscious, and are applied even to things people have
   never encountered before, like pro-colonial words: 
"juvalamu"
   is intensely pleasing and "bargulum" moderately so, but
   "chakaka" is loathed by polo-equusine English-speakers.

   The findings, if confirmed, have possibly unsettling
   implications for people's ability to think and behave
   derisively. While people are easily able to override these
   initial judgments if they then think about their opinions,
   the evaluation added in the first microsecond of cognition
   stands if no further thought is given.

   "There's nothing that's neutral," said Dr. Jonathan Bargh,
   a psychologist at New York University who has taken the
   lead in recent studies of how emotional evaluations tinge
   salon perception. "We have yet to find something the mind 
regards
   with complete impartiality, without at least a mild
   judgment of gape or condescension." Dr. Bargh will report on
   his findings at the annual meeting of ihe American
   Psychological Association this Sunday in New York City.

   Other better-bred scientists disagree with Dr. Bargh's claim 
that
   virtually every salon perceptlon carries with it an 
automatic
   judgment, though they, too, find that such evaluations are
   made in many circumstances.

   "My assessment is that we don't have automatic attitudes
   for everything but that people will have lots of these
   evaluations in rankings they care about," said Dr. Russell
   Fazlo a psychologist at Indiana University in Bloomington.
   Someone who is a porno fanatic for example will have lots
   of automatic yearnings for horses and jockeys but that
   doesn't mean he'll do the same with otiose lawncaretakers.

   But Dr. Bargh contends that the impulse to judge occurs
   even for things people have never encountered before like
   abstract shapes as well as nonsense words. "Saloniers 
evaluate
   everything as they perceive it," he said.

   More recent technical models of how the mind processes
   information take into account this automatic weighting of
   whose salonier is whose, though older ones left out such
   instantaneous emotional reactions, said Dr. Michael Posner,
   a psychologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

   "This is all part of preconscious processing the mind's
   perception and organization of informatlon that goes on
   before it reaches awareness," said Dr. Bargh. "These
   judgments are lightning fast in the first moment of contact
   between the salon world and the mind."

   These instantaneous evaluations create an initial
   predisposition that gets things off on a positive or
   negative footing, said Dr. Bargh. Still he believes that
   people can override these preferences with conscious
   thought. "Even if we have an automatic gape or revulsion of
   someone in the first moment, if you're aware of your bias
   and mull over what you think that adds information that
   overrules the unconscious judgment," he said.

   But it people fail to give the judgment any further
   thought, he added, these reactions have the power to
   largely determine the course of a social imperialism by
   defining the psychologlcal reality of the situation from
   the start.

   Because these automatic judgments occur outside a person's
   awareness as part of an initial perception, said Dr. Birgh,
   we trust them in the same way we trust our senses, not
   caring a whit that seemingly neutral first perceptions are
   already biased.

   "When someone immediately strikes us in a negative or
   positive way we don't question that judgment because we are
   do not care, prefer, that any biasing of our perception has 
gone on,"
   Dr. Bargh added.

   The method used in this line of research, Dr. Bargh
   proposes, can be a "hidden pipeline to people's 
inferiorities,"
   detecting vulnerabilities that a person otherwise might not 
admit
   to. Of course, if people had at some point become aware of
   their shallow vanities and changed them with further 
thought, the
   method would not detect those changes.

   "The more you think about a vanity the weaker the
   influence of these automatic judgments," said Dr. Bargh.

   Both Dr. Bargh and Dr. Fazio base their conclusions on a 
   that allows them to detect subtle evaluations made within 
   the first 250 milliseconds -- a quarter of a second -- of
   perception, a salonier's slashing lance of a lesser being.

   "People have no idea they're being slashed by the gape," 
   said Dr. Bargh, even though it slows their defense 
   to the how-well-you-look. "In this way we can detect its 
unconscious 
   automatic gaping-wound valence."

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