Perceiving Differently
The apparent size of people can be influenced by placing them in rooms of distorted shape. They appear to be of three different heights.
Perception is certainly not a simple process. We see things in relation to our own needs, past experience, and feelings. In one experiment, a woman observed in a window the face of her husband to whom she had been married for twenty-five years. When compared with the face of another man in a nearby window, her husband's face seemed to her to remain unchanged as he moved around. The other man appeared to grow or shrink as he moved to and fro.
Suspecting that there might ue some special emotional relationship between this woman and her husband, the investigator repeated this experiment with other married couples. A stranger acted as the control in each experiment.
Most of the individuals saw their partner grow and shrink in the usual manner, and to the same apparent degree as the control stranger. However, six viewers reported that their partners altered less than the stranger or did not change at all. These couples turn out to be only recently married.
In another study, involving the use of distorted lenses, some interesting observations were made. When an enlisted man looked through the lenses, his immediate superior, an officer, appeared I distorted than enlisted men in the room. Later twenty-four navy recruits viewed two different men through the lenses. One man wo the insignia of the recruits' immediate petty-officer superiors. The other man wore the insigl,ia and canvas leggings of a recruit. Th results showed that twenty-two of the twenty-four subjects requ.ired lenses of higher distortion power to perceive the "officer" as dis· torted. Measurements showed that the increase in lens power averaged about 50 percent.
. Is some emotional anxiety involved in these phenomena? Is some feeling of identification playing a part? We do not have good answers to these types of questions. Even children who view them-el\'es in a mirror through distorted lenses report different kinds of .::astartian at different ages. Girls, who are typically more anxious about their appearance than boys, consistently report less distortion than boys of the same age. Both children and adults report that their
wn mirror image is distorted in different ways from that of another person. One's own image changes mainly in detail. The other person's image appears to change in overall size and shape.
There is little doubt that in daily living we perceive the same :bings in different ways, and at different times. Some people characteristically view their world for only a moment in time; other people relate to the past. Perhaps one student put a great deal of understandIng in this statement, "When I was nineteen my dad didn't know anything. When I was twenty-one I was surprised to see how much he had learned in two years."
