3.3 Contrasting frames: the experience versus the academic description
Having experienced the Heider and Simmel (1944) experiment for yourself in Activity 5, and then having found out about how it is commonly understood in Activity 6, you have encountered two sense-making frames. The first frame is your own, based on your experience of watching the stimulus from the study. The other frame is that of the many experts who have subsequently written about or reported on this experiment – who, of course, give no sign of having participated in it in any sense.
Those participating in the experiment report a story and maybe affective responses to this story that are being evoked or caused in them by the video material. Social psychologists, in turn, learn from the study that humans cannot help but attribute or impose meanings onto the world: it is as though our minds played a trick on us. Social psychologists, then, seem to say: ‘there are simply some moving triangles in front of us but we cannot help but see them fighting!’
These two frames very conspicuously do not match. We have a crisis. Who is right? How do we decide?
Activity 7 Contrasting two frames
In this activity, you will see your response to the Heider and Simmel stimulus from Activity 5 alongside the expert summary and the AI-generated ’summary of expert summaries’ you read in Activity 6, where you examined the differences between these summaries and your experience. This time, your task is to consider which of these two frames is right and which one is wrong.
Spend around 5 minutes simply reflecting on the two frames. Then answer the poll question that follows by choosing your answer and selecting ‘Submit Vote’. Once you have submitted your answer, you will be able to anonymously see how other learners on this course have responded.
Summary 1
The search for causes does seem to pervade human thought, and indeed it can be difficult to explain or comment on something without using causal language. Heider and Simmel (1944) demonstrated this in an ingenious experiment in which people who were asked to describe the movement of abstract geometric figures described them as if they were humans with intentions to act in certain ways.
Summary 2
Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s 1944 study ‘An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior’ showed that people spontaneously attribute intentions and emotions to simple moving shapes. When participants watched animated triangles and a circle, they described them as chasing, fighting, or comforting – revealing our innate tendency to impose social meaning on abstract motion.
Discussion
In this case, we on the course team are firmly of the opinion that the participants (including you and us) are right and the experts wrong! Why? Because the experts seem to miss out one crucially important part of the study that we think the participants are all aware of: it is not just that the shapes in the animation move about; rather, the movement of the triangles and the circle is coordinated. That is, it is not the forms of the objects (i.e. the triangles and the circle) that tell a story – it is their movement with respect to each other that does!
Obviously, participants did not recognise an object, say, a ‘bully’ because what they saw was a big triangle. They recognised the shape as a ‘bully’ because its movement in relation to the other two shapes was not random or haphazard but communicated a relationship. Interestingly, therefore, it is the kind of affective and perceptual sense-making of participants that appears more adequate, whereas the sense-making of experts seems to be misguided. Heider and Simmel’s study shows very clearly how dangerous it can be to neglect participants’ experiences when approaching social psychological phenomena.
In this section, you have developed and examined two frames to understand Heider and Simmel’s classic 1944 study. First, you participated in the experiment and therefore developed, spontaneously, an experiential frame. Then, you considered the typical social psychological understandings of this classic study, examining what you might call the common ‘expert’ frame. Finally, you compared and contrasted these two frames, noting rather important differences.
The discrepancy between these frames, in turn, brought about a crisis in your sense-making. Which frame is right? Where does meaning reside? Is it simply in the mind and something that we impose onto otherwise meaningless objects like geometric shapes? Or is meaning somehow something we sense out there in the world?
Meaning, however, is neither in the eye of the beholder nor simply ‘out there’. Consider what Heider wrote about the stimulus in his autobiography: ‘As I planned the action of the film, I thought of the small triangle and the circle as a pair of lovers or friends and I thought of the big triangle as a bully who intruded on them’ (Heider, 1983, p. 148). In other words, when participants in this study perceived the coordinated movements of two triangles and a circle as acting out a story, what they perceived was a communicative act: the geometrical figures are meaningful in themselves because they were arranged to communicate that meaning by their creator Heider. Moreover, this was a successful communicative act because what the animation showed was not simply ‘the movement of abstract geometric figures’ (Hogg and Vaughan, 2008, p. 81). This ‘movement’ was not random or haphazard, but was arranged exactly so that you as a viewer would make sense of it as a story and, hence, that it would evoke feelings.
What Heider and Simmel (1944) teach us, therefore, is not really how many social psychologists understood it: that we somehow arbitrarily attribute meaning to an essentially meaningless world. Rather, it teaches us that we are connected through culturally shared symbols within a shared world. Those symbols can be used as meaningful elements to make sense and tell stories. Made sense of this way, Heider and Simmel (1944) were early forerunners of the message of this short course!
OpenLearn - Social psychology: sense-making in crises
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