This second example is far more jarring, and shows what I meant earlier by ‘caricatures’ and the way they distort the learning experience of the reader. On p.78, we are asked to evaluate a picture of two people that are (presumably) interacting in some way, and asked what it is we see. Well, I wrote down what I saw before reading on:
“She looks away with a look of longing (drifting eyes, a ‘genuine’ smile), so she probably was either elicited to recall a pleasant memory or sharing that memory with the man standing next to her before drifting off. Her head is tilted, which again makes me feel like she is highly entranced by that memory. She is manipulating her wrist, but that could have significance in respect to the memory – pacifying herself, meaning whatever she is thinking of comforts her.
“The man is looking at her with particular interest, and his posture is upright, so he is clearly comfortable in the situation, as is she. He stands in genital framing, at an unintrusive 90 degree angle. The significance of this would probably be better understood after invading this conversation (if it even is one – it is not immediately clear, and it could just be that the man fancies this girl).”
In retrospect, this seems completely plausible and vastly more apparent than the conclusion Hadnagy draws from this and tries to convince us is evident. More specifically, he states ‘Did you notice that Ben is trying to assert his dominance?’ which I don’t agree he necessarily is, mostly because of the angle and the way that Selena seems content with the situation, and ‘She doesn’t look too comfortable with his approach, does she?’ which I’d say she does, and I wouldn’t even necessarily agree it is an approach.
The point is not that I’m right and he’s wrong, or vice versa, the point is that it isn’t clear at all who is right, and why. This is more interpretation than observation.
To illustrate and support my proposition that this is more than just a tangential affair, and rather a fundamental problem, I went out (as I was writing this part of the review) and polled people on what they thought was going on in this image, in particular what emotions they thought the two subjects (Ben and Selena) were feeling. Furthermore, they read none of the text, nor did I brief them, instead debriefing them on the contents of the book and what I was hoping to demonstrate afterwards.
Before we get into their interpretations, I’ll start by saying we saw three big issues show up:
First, the resolution of the images is obviously problematic. It is not clear whether the man is frowning with his left eye (since the skin under the eye seems raised), and this means that it’s unclear what his intentions and emotional state are. (I’ll get back to this in a bit.) This is clearly a limitation of low-resolution black-and-white pictures.
Second, the intentionally acted set-up (for clarity, I presume) actually makes it a lot harder to determine what is going on, because there are certain natural clues that are completely missing. You can tell Ben to act confident, and Selena to act discomforted, but without context it is very difficult to get anything meaningful from this display. If you wanted to know if Selena were truly discomforted, you’d have to talk to them first, which creates a situation where analyzing the situation pre-hand is not relevant anymore.
Third, all of the cues can be explained differently, and it became more a matter of consensus than analysis, more vague than concrete. Upon comparing each raised possibility, all participants agreed that they were all likely – so much so, that they could no longer confidently support their own initial interpretation, even though I made no personal attempts to dissuade them. In fact, when asking groups for their member’s individual opinions, which could be quite different, none seemed to challenge the others’ opinions in the slightest, even if their own opinions were different.
This type of ambiguity in an example exercise is inexcusable.
Note, I might be a skilled persuader, but I did not attempt to persuade them into anything but their cooperation with my poll. In fact, I merely asked them to give feedback on certain other interpretations far after they had completed my request and discussed it amongst themselves. I did not serve as an intermediary in their discussion in any way.
Continue Reading – [005] Four of a Different Kind
