《社会心理学》课程教学资源（文献资料）conformity——Speaking From Ignorance - Not Agreeing With Others We Believe Are Correct.pdf

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES Speaking From Ignorance: Not Agreeing With Others We Believe Are Correct Bert H. Hodges Gordon College and University of Connecticut Benjamin R. Meagher University of Connecticut Daniel J. Norton Boston University Ryan McBain Harvard University Ariane Sroubek Yeshiva University Values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006) predicts that people will sometimes disagree with others they believe are correct, for reasons similar to those explaining agreement with incorrect answers in an Asch (1956) situation. In 3 experiments, we found evidence that people in a position of ignorance sometimes do not agree with the correct answers of others in positions of knowledge. Experiments 1a and 1b found this speaking-from-ignorance (SFI) effect occurred 27% of the time. Experiment 2 introduced experimental controls and self-report data indicating that the SFI effect (30%) was generated by realizing values (e.g., truth, social solidarity) and pragmatic constraints to act cooperatively, rather than by a wide array of alternatives (e.g., normative pressure, reactance). Experiment 3 experimentally manipulated concern for truthfulness, yielding 49% nonagreeing answers, even though there were monetary incentives to give correct, agreeing answers. The overall pattern suggests that people are not so much conformists or independents as they are cooperative truth tellers under social and moral constraints. Results, while surprising for social influence theories, illustrate the dynamics of divergence and convergence that appear across studies in cultural anthropology and developmental psychology, as well as in social psychology. Keywords: conformity, divergence, pragmatics, truth, values We often find ourselves laughing at people who speak from ignorance, especially if they are politicians whose views we find distasteful or celebrities whose reputations we think are overblown. In occasional moments of insight, though, we may realize that we too have talked about a topic about which we knew little or nothing as if we were well informed, all the while showing our ignorance. The question we address in this article is, “What do people do when they are invited to speak from ignorance and they believe they are talking with people who know more about the topic than they themselves?” Suppose, for example, you find yourself in a situation in which other people can see what is going on, while you cannot, but these more knowledgeable others share what they see with you. If you were asked to speak, would you (a) make up your own answer or (b) repeat what others have told you? Of course, the issue is much broader than just speaking from ignorance. Humans must regularly act from ignorance. For example, an individual is new to farming and does not know what to plant: Should she plant what her more experienced neighbors plant or something different? A tourist visits another culture about which he knows very little: Should he follow the lead of others who are more culturally sophisticated or just wing it? The eminently sensible thing to do, it appears, is to follow the lead of others who know more than we do (D. T. Campbell, 1990). When information is absent or ambiguous for an individual and others provide what is believed to be trustworthy information, the only sensible response seems to be conformity. Being guided by those with expertise is a fundamental tenet of cultural evolution (e.g., Bert H. Hodges, Department of Psychology, Gordon College, and Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut; Benjamin R. Meagher, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut; Daniel J. Norton, Department of Psychology, Boston University; Ryan McBain, School of Public Health, Harvard University; Ariane Sroubek, Ferkauf School of Graduate Psychology, Yeshiva University. Support from Gordon College (Initiative Grant) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-0843219) to Bert H. Hodges is gratefully acknowledged. Earlier versions of parts of this article were presented to the meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, Portland, Maine (2009, October). We thank Alyssa Barkley, Justina Cassidy, Timothy Couper, Ryan Daley, Jenni Damiani, Jennifer Davies, Alice Dennis, Dustin Foss, Michelle Halla, Nathan Josephs, Joyce Lacy, Jenna Meisenhelder, Aaron Noga, Katherine O’Donnell, Valerie Plichta, Rylee Rainwater, Landon Ranck, Zachary Reynolds, Jocelyn Rioux, Aashley Thompson, Greg Walter, and Ann-Elise Wright, among others, for their crucial contributions in various phases of the research. We are grateful to Reuben Baron, Marilynn Brewer, Stephen Cowley, Erin Devers, Stephanie Dibble, Jonathan Gerber, John Levine, Kerry Marsh, Michael McCullough, Paul Nail, Radmila Prislin, Stephen Rizzo, and Anne Zell for their helpful comments on the studies or earlier versions of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bert H. Hodges, Department of Psychology, Gordon College, Wenham, MA 01984. E-mail: bert.hodges@gordon.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014, Vol. 106, No. 2, 218 –234 © 2014 American Psychological Association 0022-3514/14/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0034662 218

Mesoudi, 2009; Richerson & Boyd, 2005). Nearly every theory in social psychology, especially those about social influence, would agree. There are many compelling reasons to do so. Two of the most powerful are believed to be the following: (a) People want to be correct, and the most likely way to be correct in this situation is to agree with others, and (b) people want to be accepted and liked by others, and one of the most reliable ways to do this is to agree with other people’s views (e.g., J. D. Campbell & Fairey, 1989; Claidière & Whiten, 2012; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). The speaking-from-ignorance (SFI) situation, described earlier, appears tailor-made for conformity. However, we argue that it is considerably more complicated than it first appears. More specifically, we predicted that individuals asked to speak from ignorance would often choose not to agree with the correct answers of more knowledgeable others. Their reasons for doing so would not be stupidity, stubbornness, or independence. Rather, their failures to agree would be generated by pragmatic considerations for speaking to others in a cooperative and pragmatically warranted way and by their seeking to acknowledge values, particularly truth, social solidarity, and trust. The experiments tested a hypothesis explicitly posed by values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006), an account that has proved valuable for explaining Asch’s (1951, 1956) well-known studies, in which he used a task that seems tailor-made for dissent. The overarching argument we offer is that a single set of complex dynamics can account for people sometimes agreeing when they might be expected to disagree (i.e., Asch situation) and sometimes disagreeing when they might be expected to agree (i.e., the SFI situation). We begin by introducing selected aspects of values-pragmatics theory, illustrating it, first, using driving as an example, then applying it to Asch’s (1956) speaking-from-knowledge situation. Then we turn to a more careful analysis of the SFI situation. Values-Pragmatics Theory Values-realizing theory is a general theoretical approach to perception, action, and cognition, which has been applied to perception-action tasks (e.g. Hodges, 2007b; Hodges & Lindhiem, 2006), social and developmental issues (e.g., Hodges & Baron, 1992; Hodges & Geyer, 2006), and language and cognition (e.g., Hodges, 2007a, 2009). Applied to social communicative contexts, values-realizing theory has sometimes been referred to as valuespragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006), and that is the designation we use in this article. According to the theory, values are the real goods that define fields of action within ecosystems; that is, they constrain what is possible to do that makes an activity worth doing. Consider, for example, the ecosystem of driving. The act of driving brings into existence a field (in the sense used in physics) that guides the driver’s actions. This field, which has been called the field of safe travel (Gibson & Crooks, 1938), is a very real physical field that opens up before the vehicle, is bounded by obstacles (e.g., buildings, trees, other vehicles), and is continuously changing its size and shape. It is also a social field, since it depends crucially, often moment to moment, on the actions of others. Values define the field of action and are obligatory: Unless safety, travel (i.e., freedom of movement), and other values such as accuracy and tolerance (e.g., distance between vehicles) are realized sufficiently, the field will literally cease to exist (Hodges, 2007b). According to values-pragmatics theory, values are not located in persons or in objects but are better thought of as real demands placed on relationships, so that action and perception are constrained by values, regardless of whether or not there is any explicit awareness or acknowledgment of those demands. For example, the field of safe driving is not a projection of the driver (e.g., it exists even if the driver is not looking), nor does it exist in cars, roads, or other objects. Rather, it exists as a dynamic field of possibilities “for good or ill” (i.e., affordances; Gibson, 1979/ 1986, p. 127) that obligate the driver’s ongoing actions relative to cars, roads, and other objects. Thus, values constitute real ontological, epistemic, and ethical demands on possible actions, and as such, they cannot be equated with social norms, personal preferences, or biological needs. Individuals or groups may vary in how skilled they are in attending to and realizing particular values, but individuals and groups do not “possess” values. Rather, values define the goods that make their existence and action possible.1 According to values-pragmatics theory (Hodges, 2007b), any psychological activity is constrained by multiple goods. Driving, or any other psychological activity, is never about a single value, such as safety, or accuracy, or efficiency. If one cared only for safety, one would never drive; if one cared only for accuracy, driving would become intolerant and thus inefficient and unsafe. As a values-realizing activity, driving cannot be reduced to goal seeking (Hodges & Baron, 1992). These multiple values are heterarchically organized. Heterarchical, a term first used by Warren McCulloch (1945), means that actions are mutually constrained by all the values, so that there is no fixed, hierarchical ordering of values; rather, across time and task, values vary in their ordering for the sake of the joint realization of all the values (i.e., the ecosystem as a whole). (Hodges, 2009, p. 632) In driving, for example, speed and accuracy may take priority over safety at one place or time but then reverse at another. These are not simple tradeoffs: Sometimes safety might lead to increased speed and increased accuracy (tighter tolerances). Good driving is a continuous balancing act, making ongoing adjustments to realize all the values. It is possible, of course, to engage in bad driving, but there are very real limits, and our very ability to identify such misbehavior depends on our implicit ability to recognize and enact the goods (i.e., values) of driving. To illustrate and clarify the worth of this way of characterizing values, we review its application to Asch’s (1951) social dilemma, in which he had people answer questions that others had answered incorrectly (see Hodges & Geyer, 2006, for an extended discussion). The Dilemma of Speaking From Knowledge In Asch’s (1956) experimental paradigm, everyone could see the visual information about which they were being asked equally well; the participants answered questions from a position of knowledge. The only difficulty, of course, was when all of the other participants gave the same wrong answer. Although the 1 Asch (1952, chapter 12) himself offered an account of values that has much in common with values-pragmatics theory (Hodges, 2007b), although he was influenced by the Gestalt tradition (e.g., Asch, 1968; Köhler, 1937/1966), while Hodges and Baron (1992) developed their account in relation to Gibson’s (1979/1986) ecological psychology. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. SPEAKING FROM IGNORANCE 219

studies are famous for the number of times participants agreed with wrong answers (e.g., Moscovici, 1985), the bigger surprise may be the much larger number of times they dissented from the unanimous majority, about two thirds of the time (e.g., Friend, Rafferty, & Bramel, 1990; Harris, 1985). The most common behavior was to dissent most of the time but to agree occasionally, captured in the median response of nine dissenting answers and three incorrect answers on critical trials. This basic result presents fundamental problems for the usual accounts offered to explain the results (Hodges & Geyer, 2006). Normative accounts simply do not address the massive amount of truth-telling dissent observed in Asch situations (over 70% of participants always or mostly dissent). Information-based accounts, which assume that the dilemma is about epistemological uncertainty, can plausibly account for diverse responses but suffer from findings that there is a sharp reduction in agreeing answers when answers are not publicly shared with one’s peers (Asch, 1955, 1956). Results of this sort suggest that the dilemma is less a matter of epistemic confusion than it is a struggle to know what is appropriate to say in an awkward, tense situation. Asch (1955, 1956) thought he had designed a moral dilemma, an all-or-nothing choice between right (i.e., answering the experimenter’s question truthfully) and wrong (i.e., submitting to consensus rather than maintaining one’s independence). Many psychologists since Asch seem to have adopted a zero-tolerance standard (Friend et al., 1990; Krueger & Funder, 2004) regarding agreement with wrong answers: A single agreement with a wrong answer is enough to count one as a conformist, implying that the person is not dissenting even if he or she disagrees 11 times out of 12. Effectively, this all-or-nothing approach renders dissent as uninteresting and uninformative. Numerous researchers have questioned the conformity account of Asch’s (1956) results (e.g., Friend et al., 1990; Harris, 1985; Hodges & Geyer, 2006; Krueger & Massey, 2009; McCauley & Rozin, 2003). One of the most interesting of these is D. T. Campbell (1990), who argued that Asch was wrong to view consensus in such a negative way; it is actually a necessary good, especially when viewed from an evolutionary standpoint. Thus, Asch’s dilemma might better be regarded as a choice not between right and wrong but between multiple goods in tension. Following Campbell, Hodges and Geyer (2006) claimed that there are at least three salient values at stake in the Asch situation: truth (i.e., honestly expressing one’s own view), trust (i.e., acknowledging the value of others’ views), and social solidarity (i.e., integrating the views of self and others without deprecating either). Seeing the dilemma as a tension among values might naturally lead one to think of the situation in terms of tragic tradeoffs, but Hodges and Geyer proposed that there are pragmatic resources, which allow for a more creative, balanced response. One such resource is that there are 12 critical trials, which allow participants to vary their behavior rather than being trapped by an all-or-none dilemma. A values-pragmatic analysis suggests a complex array of relationships and obligations are at stake in the Asch situation: “How does one speak the truth in a complex, tense, and frustrating situation . . . in a way that simultaneously honors one’s peers, the experimenter, one’s own perception, and the situation in which all are embedded?” (Hodges, 2004, p. 344). The nature of truth, as it functions in the Asch situation, is larger and more complex than can be captured by mere accuracy. Thus, the situation calls for people to speak truthfully but in a way that reveals something of the awkwardness and tension of the situation and that is respectful of others’ views, even if one disagrees sharply with them. To repeat the wrong answers of others is to acknowledge that one hears and understands their point of view, even if one has otherwise made one’s disagreement plain. Participants can realize multiple values in an inherently frustrating situation by varying patterns of dissent and agreement to communicate larger scale truths and cooperative intentions. Agreeing some of the time with incorrect answers can function as a pragmatic signal of one’s commitment to taking others’ views seriously (i.e., social solidarity) and one’s openness to further conversation about the situation. If a person always dissented from a group’s expressed views, it would be easy for that person to be seen as arrogant or dismissive. It is because of the heterarchical relations among values that those participants who offer truthful dissent will increasingly be constrained to offer a sign of their trust and social solidarity with those from whom they are dissenting. Dissent, after all, cannot function if it is directed toward people who do not care what others think or if the people who offer it have no concern for those to whom the dissent is addressed. Dissent implicitly appeals to some sense of shared concern for truth and other goods that provide a common ground for communicative discourse and social interaction. The complexity of the physical, social, and moral dynamics embodied in Asch’s dilemma is not unlike the complexity that drivers face in negotiating the physical, social, and moral hazards of the road. Values must be realized continuously, in ways that require ongoing pragmatic judgments and adjustments. The dominant pattern observed, mostly disagreeing but sometimes agreeing (e.g., the 9/3 pattern), seems to do just this, as does the diversity of responses in the experiment as a whole (Asch, 1956; Hodges & Geyer, 2006). From this perspective, it was wrong for Asch to assume that an individual speaking to others with whom he or she has a sharp disagreement should say exactly the same thing he or she would have said when alone with the experimenter. Acting in a social dilemma requires sensitivity and finesse, not simply independence and honesty. The Dilemma of Speaking From Ignorance At first glance, the SFI situation seems quite unlike the Asch situation: Participants do not have visual information available that contradicts information provided by other witnesses. From this perspective, there should be no dilemma. To see more clearly how the SFI task could pose a dilemma for participants, however, consider the pragmatics of the situation. Pragmatics, which is the study of the contextual appropriateness of situated utterances, can itself be understood as grounded in values (Grice, 1991). For example, Grice’s (1975) well-known cooperativeness principle is an attempt to delineate key demands (i.e., values), such as honesty, economy, and coherence, that speakers and listeners must realize if they are to function effectively in conversations. The pragmatic cooperativeness that is entailed in ordinary conversations usually involves the following: saying neither what you believe to be false nor that for which you lack adequate evidence (Grice, 1975). An SFI situation pulls and twists these two aspects of cooperation inside out, creating a frustrating tension. One solution is to consider the answers of others to be adequate evidence; the other This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 220 HODGES, MEAGHER, NORTON, MCBAIN, AND SROUBEK

solution is to consider guessing at what one cannot see clearly, as an honest acknowledgment of one’s ignorance. Neither of these solutions is entirely satisfactory. Thus, there is likely to be instability, with fluctuating tendencies between possible solutions, both within and across individuals, leading to considerable variability in responses to the dilemma. The pragmatic analysis of the SFI situation suggests that the same three values at work in the Asch situation—truth, trust, and social solidarity—are also at play in the SFI dilemma. Asch (1952, 1955) thought it obvious that one should trust one’s own eyes in preference to others’ in his situation; however, in an SFI situation, it seems obvious that one should trust others and not oneself. Both predictions assume, though, that what is properly motivating participants’ choices is the goal of answering as many questions correctly as possible. Perhaps participants’ motivations are more complex than this. What if, for example, participants are motivated to speak truthfully in an SFI situation? If participants think they are being asked to speak based only on what they themselves can see, then they are likely to feel constrained to indicate their ignorance, answering incorrectly. They will have spoken truthfully but not correctly. Although it is often assumed that speaking truthfully would entail answering a question correctly, we have argued there are cases where being truthful cannot be reduced to accuracy. The Asch situation, we think, is one of those where the most comprehensive accounting of what is true will take into consideration the differing views of one’s colleagues and the frustrating tension of the disagreement, given that one had good reasons to expect agreement. If the pragmatics of the SFI situation make it difficult to know how to act cooperatively and if truthfulness might nudge some people some of the time to choose to reveal their ignorance, what role is played by social solidarity and by trust? Regarding trust, we assume that participants in a position of ignorance will trust others in better positions to know unless they have evidence to the contrary. Social solidarity, though, is not as straightforward. On the one hand, the SFI situation invites a sharing of views; on the other hand, participants are likely to feel there is nothing for them to say except to repeat what others have said. Ordinary conversational pragmatics lead people to expect they can make a unique contribution to a conversation based on their own point of view and experience. It is not wrong to repeat what other, better informed people have told you, but it is awkward to do so based only on blind trust. Thus, it also makes sense to offer honestly one’s own perspective, even if it is likely to be incorrect. Social solidarity involves more than simple consensus or uniformity. It is more concerned with maintaining the integrity of the relationship among group members and advancing the welfare and effectiveness of the group. This may require complementary actions, in which each member of the group fulfills differing roles in generating the overall action of the group. As numerous authors have pointed out, disagreements can be a reflection of interdependence and commitment to a group, rather than expressions of independence or disloyalty (e.g., Hornsey & Jetten, 2004; Packer, 2008). Generally, in an SFI situation, social solidarity would move one toward agreement (the others are correct after all), but since the agreement comes without pragmatic warrant, participants might feel constrained to acknowledge their ignorance at least some of the time. Overall, it is the pragmatic relation among the various values in a particular task that can have an effect on decisions to agree or disagree. Generally, trust will tend to generate agreeing answers, but truthfulness will constrain that tendency, yielding significant amounts of disagreement. Social solidarity will generally encourage agreeing answers unless the situation is one in which those answers would threaten the well-being of the group or strain the relationship among its members. Given this general set of relations, it is reasonable to expect that most people most of the time will agree with correct answers of others. However, the pragmatic constraint to speak truthfully and with epistemic warrant will lead to a significant number of answers that do not conform to the correct answers of better informed others. We refer to these nonconforming, incorrect answers as the SFI effect. This effect, first predicted by Hodges and Geyer (2006), was tested in the experiments reported here as a way of testing whether people would conform when it seems like the normatively correct thing to do. How large should such an SFI effect be, if it occurs? Perhaps, the best comparison is Asch’s situation, which has been interpreted by a zero-tolerance standard. Any agreement with wrong answers is considered as constituting conformity (Friend et al., 1990; Hodges, 2004; Krueger & Funder, 2004). The SFI situation effectively inverts the Asch situation. When one has no information or entirely ambiguous information and others are believed to have clear, correct information that they share, there is every reason to believe that agreement with those answers will be unanimous. Thus, we assume a zero-tolerance standard as well. If people conform in an SFI situation, they would be expected always to give correct, agreeing answers. One could argue that the normative expectations (i.e., what seems socially appropriate) are even stronger in an SFI situation than in an Asch situation. If that is the case, it seems all the more appropriate for the SFI effect to be evaluated by the same criterion used to evaluate Asch’s results. Overview of Experiments The first experiments we report (Experiments 1a and 1b) were exploratory: Is there evidence for an SFI effect? In the second experiment, participants gave answers both in a position of knowledge and in a position of ignorance. This manipulation allowed for a stronger test of the SFI effect and, along with self-report measures on motivations and perceptions of the task, enabled us to evaluate whether there was evidence supporting a valuespragmatics account (e.g., concern for truthfulness). In addition, it provided various means for testing whether there were alternative accounts (e.g., reactance, refusal to imitate) that might explain an SFI effect. In a third experiment, we manipulated participants’ concern for speaking truthfully to see if this increased nonagreeing answers, as predicted by values-pragmatics theory. Experiments 1a and 1b Method Procedure. Participants volunteered for a study on “visual processing from different angles and distances” and were told that they would be placed in different positions and asked to answer questions about information projected onto the screen. Their task would be to “give the most correct answer that you can” to each This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. SPEAKING FROM IGNORANCE 221

question, which would require “looking and listening carefully.” They were shown one sample slide, which demonstrated that the correct word could be easily identified when sitting in front of the screen. Then they were placed in Positions A, B, and C, as shown in Figure 1, and told that they would take turns giving their answers, by position, as called out by the experimenter. They were instructed to sit straight without leaning and reminded to give the most correct answer they could. The experimenter presented 18 slides. Answers were given in the order A, B, C on Trial 1; B, A, C, on Trial 2; and C, A, B on Trial 3; repeating for the remaining trials. After answering the 18 questions, participants completed a questionnaire about the task and were debriefed. Experiment 1b was a replication of Experiment 1a with one small change in procedure to be described later. Stimulus materials and questionnaire. On each trial, participants were asked to identify a target word, which was superimposed on other words and/or visual patterns, as illustrated in Figure 2. These figures, called CAPTCHAs (Carnegie Mellon University, www.captcha.net), sometimes resized or reshaped, were positioned on the screen so that selected target words could be read from Positions A and B but not from Position C. Figures mostly appeared on the upper portion of the left side, the opposite side from which C was viewing the figures. To establish the inability of individuals at Position C to see clearly, a group of 10 people from the same pool as experimental participants followed the same procedure, except that they were alone. They were never able to give a correct answer to any of the slides. After the experimental task, participants answered questions about their impressions of their viewing position, how they felt when they could not see clearly and others answered first, how many questions they thought each participant had answered correctly, how much weight they gave to others’ answers relative to their own view in deciding what to say, whether they knew other participants and what their impression of them was (e.g., trusting, suspicious), and what their impression of the experiment as a whole was. Experimental layout. In order to assure that Participants A and B gave the same, correct answer to all questions, Participants A and B were trained confederates. Their answers were deliberate, confident, and accurate. All answers were single words (e.g., sponge, mouth). The true participant, C, was the last to answer on 12 trials: These were the critical trials in which participants, having heard two better positioned persons give the same answer, were confronted by their inability to see clearly. On the other six trials, participants at Position C answered first and, since they could not see clearly, were only able to guess. These trials reduced the likelihood that C would perceive the experiment as one that was focused on the relationship between his or her answers and those of A and B. Position A was located about 6.5 m from the projected image on the screen and orthogonal to it, B was about 5.1 m at a 45° angle, and C was about 3.8 m at a 3° angle. The screen was approximately 2.5 m high 3.0 m wide, and figures generally took up less than 0.4 m2 . These details matter less than whether their configuration meets the proper epistemological criteria. The critical participants at C must be able to see just enough that it is plausible that they are being asked to answer questions about the projected words but not so much that they can identify the correct answer. It must also be obvious to C that the other positions are much better for seeing clearly. Thus, participants in Positions A and B should be able to give correct answers easily if they are being attentive and careful. Pretesting established that Participant C was able to see that there were wordlike forms on the screen; occasionally, approximate length of words or individual letters were discernible, screen___________________________________ C- 6 5 B- 4 3 2 A- 1 Figure 1. Positions (not to scale) of participants in Experiments 1a and 1b (A, B, C) and Experiment 2 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). In Experiment 3, Positions 2, 4, and 6 were used. Figure 2. A sample slide used in experiments (reduced to black and white). The question asked was, “What is the bottom word in the lower right hand corner?” Answer: warm. (Sample question had indicated meaning of spatial terms, such as bottom, to be two-dimensional.) This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 222 HODGES, MEAGHER, NORTON, MCBAIN, AND SROUBEK