Interpreting Ambiguous Pictures

Sarah Hak

There have been a lot of developments in the exploration of how different people perceive different stimuli in this world. One of the most well known tests is the Thematic Apperception Test developed by Christina D Morgan and Henry A Murry in the 1930s at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. This test consists of showing an ambiguous picture to different people and noting their responses to the stimuli. This was considered a worthy experiment to explore because it was felt that ‘if you ask a number of observers to look at a photograph...the variability of their reports will be amazingly high.’ (Leibowitz 1965: p37) There are many factors that affect the way in which humans perceive a stimulus and these include cultural differences and individual differences. In order to explore how an ambiguous picture is interpreted differently by different people I developed a questionnaire to ask the subjects questions about their personality and cultural background as well as personal statistics. The ambiguous picture I chose was originally a TAT card used by Morgan and Murry in their own experiments. The picture is described as ‘a young man lying prostrate on a bed and a young women standing outside the door with her head buried in her hand.’ Underneath the picture there was a caption which said "'Why did I marry him?’, she said dazed. ‘Why?'". This caption gave too much information about the picture and therefore I cut out the caption and just used ‘picture c’ as the stimulus for my tests.

The results that I got from the question ‘what is going on in this picture?’ showed clear similarities and differences. The differences seen are subtle but can be related to individual and cultural influences and many of the differences link to previous research into individual perception. The similarities in the answers gained from the experiment often refer to what is obviously shown within the picture and therefore form the basis of the answer, without the individual’s own personal insights. However there were also general assumptions made in the answers which were repeatedly made by the subjects shown picture c. Most of the answers claimed that the women was ‘upset’ or ‘distraught’ and that the man was either asleep or unconscious on the bed. Both these points can be clearly seen within the picture and therefore these answers had little to do with individual personality and background. The more generally assumed answers were that the two people in the picture knew each other and that the two people had had an argument. One person answered ‘the lady is obviously upset’, showing that they were confident that the lady was upset from what the picture showed. The same person then wrote ‘having possibly had an argument with her husband,’ by saying ‘possibly’ this suggests that they were not so sure about this proposition because it is an assumption. As a result of the man and women being in the same picture all of the persons asked thought that the man and women knew each other. This information can not really be gained from just looking at the picture. Some of the subjects were questioned afterwards why they felt that the women and man knew each other. The majority of them answered that because the women was upset and there was only the man in the picture they assumed that he had upset her and therefore they knew each other. 

The more interesting aspect of the experiment is where the differences lie within the answers and how these differences can be related to personal and cultural influences. I asked the subjects questions about there age, sex, religion, ethnicity, occupation, marital status and personality to try and make links between what they think is going on in the picture and their individuality. The first question I asked was what sex the subject was and the answer to this showed clear differences between the way that males and females looked at and interpreted the picture. This is because ‘object identification differs between men and women’ (Vernon 1971: p633), and therefore men and women decode a picture in different ways. An experiment was conducted by Hess (1965) in which they eye movements of a man and a women were compared when they were looking at the same picture. It was noted that the female observer paid more attention to the male in the picture and the male observer paid more attention to the female in the picture. The interesting point in my experiment was that the male observers tended to mention the female in the picture first in their answer where as the female observers tended to mention the male character in the picture first. Although, as mentioned by Hess, this does show stereotypes of the way in which genders interpret a picture it seems interesting that each gender was more concerned with the situation surrounding the opposite sex in the stimuli. This therefore clearly showed a difference in the way in which men and women interpret a picture and what they notice first about the picture.

I asked people from a variety of backgrounds and of a variety of ethnicity to look at picture c and explain what is going on in the picture. It was interesting to note that those people who had been on a boat mainly interpreted the scene as being set on a boat, where as those who had never been on a boat did not suggest this idea. Many of the observers were quite positive that the scene was set on a boat saying ‘the people are on a boat’ and ‘they are on their honeymoon on a luxury ocean liner.’ The second extract I have used clearly shows how the observer even went as far as to decide what type of boat they are travelling on (if they are) even though this is not at all clear from the picture. In contrast to this a lot of those people who had not been on a boat before did not interpret the scene as being set on a boat. This therefore emphasised that the idea that the background a person has had does influence how they perceive a picture, in this example the setting being interpreted differently because of personal experiences. It can therefore be argued that there is a difference in the way in which people interpreted the scene because ‘the life history you have all affect what you perceive in any stimulus.’(Coren, Stanley, Ward & Emms 1994: p636)

There were also noticeable differences between age groups in what they thought the relationship was between the man and the women was, which could be linked to differences in the cultures of the observers answering the question ‘what is going on in this picture?’ The majority of older observers answered that the man and women in the picture were definitely married. An observer who was seventy-two said ‘she had believed her ‘husband’ to be a gentleman.’ An observer aged forty said ‘her ‘husband’s’ come home drunk.’ In contrast to this many younger observers tended to answer that the man and women were a couple and did not really state if they were married or not. An eighteen-year-old observer said that ‘the ‘couple’ are on a boat’ and a twenty-two-year-old felt that ‘the woman has had an argument with her ‘partner.’ This discovery may also link to the cultural differences between age groups because issues such as pre-marital sex are more widely accepted and discussed nowadays compared to the past. This difference may be attributed to ‘history cultural differences.... (which) may have dramatic consequences for perceptual processes’ (Coren, Stanley, Ward & Emms 1994: p603), and would therefore be an individual difference in the way in which one picture is perceived. Another interesting point was that very few people from all age groups noticed the old fashioned clothing that the women is wearing in the picture. One observer from the older age group explained that ‘I assumed that they were husband and wife because of the old fashioned clothing, from that time period the man would not have been alone with the girl.’ This shows also how people’s knowledge aids in the way in which they perceive and ambiguous picture.

Coinciding with this idea of differences between the ages groups in how they perceived the picture there was also a noticeable difference in what people felt was wrong with the man lying on the bed. Those older people, mainly over the age of eighteen perceived the man as being drunk on the bed. A person of forty said that ‘he is an alcoholic’ and another person of forty-nine thought that ‘he is now comatose on the bed.’ Although not all of the older observers said the man was drunk, the majority of them did seem to think that this was the problem. In contrast many of the younger observers suggested other reasons for the man lying on the bed. A thirteen-year-old suggested that ‘the girl has pushed him so he has hit his head and stumbled in to bed.’ Another different answer was from a fifteen year old who believed that ‘the women is a nurse who could not save the gentlemen.’ These answers show that they younger observers who are less experienced with alcohol and who would maybe know a lot less about the effects of alcohol did not as often link the man’s situation with over indulgence in alcohol. Instead they tended to see the man as ill or hurt, which is their explanation for him being sprawled on the bed in the picture. This discovery can be linked to the argument that ‘perception...draws also on the perceiver’s knowledge of the world.’ (Sekuler & Blake 1994: p453) The older observers appeared to notice the bottle next to the man and decided that the man had drunk too much and was therefore unconscious. In contrast the younger observers often failed to notice the bottle next to the man and did not link the man’s state to alcohol, which may relate to their lack of experience with alcohol.

There have been suggestions that a person’s aims and motivations can influence how that person interprets a picture. An experiment was performed by Levine, Chein and Murphy in 1942 in which there were two groups of observers shown the same picture. One group was hungry and the other group was not. Those people in the group that were hungry often saw food in the ambiguous picture where as the non-hungry group tended not to see food in the picture. Therefore the hungry group appeared to be motivated by their hunger and therefore perceived food within the picture. M.D. Vernon who believes that ‘the individual state of need is more likely to perceive something which will satisfy his mind’ also follows this argument. (Vernon 1971: p180) The reason that I am mentioning motivation is because one person’s answer to what is going on in this picture was completely different from the rest of the answers that I got from the other observer. This person is a very romantic person and tends to see her life as one big drama, which was greatly reflected within her answer. I felt that she might have been motivated by her desire for romance in her life. She said in her answer  ‘the man could be part of the marines and the women a nurse on board his boat.... I believe the couple had deeper feelings for each other than would be deemed professional.’ Therefore it seemed that this person’s desire for romance in her life did greatly influence what she perceived within the ambiguous picture.

Another discovery I made was that there were other links with personality in the way in which different people reacted to the task which they were asked to do, which was explain what is going in the picture. It is believed that ‘ambiguous stimuli can evoke responses that have the origin in the personality of the observer.’ (Leibowtz 1965: p38) When comparing the answers from an introverted person and a more extroverted person I noticed that the introverted person was a lot more reluctant to give an answer straight away. The introverted person kept asking questions as if they needed reassuring that they were interpreting the picture in the correct way. However in contrast the extroverted person tended to be more confident in their answers, saying what ever they felt was right regardless of what anyone else might have said. The introverted person tried to back up what he said by explaining what in the picture made him come to his conclusion of what is going on in the picture. At one point the introverted person said ‘They are on a cruise (hence the porthole)’ which suggests that he was insecure about saying what he personally felt was going on in case he got it wrong. The introverted person spoke only a few lines about what was going on in the picture. The extroverted person said much more about what they thought was going on, creating more of a story than an answer and using a lot more of their imagination. These differences relate to the personality of each person because the more confident person was more willing to give their own interpretation of the ambiguous picture. Else Frenkel-Brunswik conducted an experiment in 1951 where subjects were placed in a dark room where only a point of light was visible. Most people saw the light sway in various directions, but some people reported that the light moved in a constant direction from trail to trail and to a constant number of inches. The people who reported the trailing light have been described as having a ‘low tolerance of ambiguity’, requiring more stablity that most and quickly manufacturing stability in situations of ambiguity. In contrast, those who take longer to establish stability when faced with ambiguity have a ‘high tolerance of ambiguity’. From the experiment results it would appear that the extrovert who quickly gave a long and imaginative answer has a low tolerance of ambiguity. In contrast the introvert who took a long time to answer the question and kept asking his own questions has a higher tolerance of ambiguity. The influence of personality therefore also plays a role in the way in which different people interpret an ambigious picture.

In conclusion it would appear that there are many factors that determine the way in which different people interpret an ambigious picture such as picture c that I used for my experiment. Although I only asked twenty-five people to conduct my experiment, there were clearly simularities and differences between the answers that I got. There were a few simularities, but surprisingly a lot more differences in the answers I got and these differences tended to be quite subtle rather than very obvious. What I found was interesting that was from just twenty-five answers I could detect differences in the answers due to many factors including age, sex, culture, background and personality. From the results of the experiment it can therefore be considered true that ‘what you percieve in any situation is not necessarily the same as what is percieved by the person next to you’ and that in conclusion ‘who you are, the kind of person you are.... affect what you perceive’ (Coren, Stanley, Ward & Emms 1994: p636) when shown an ambiguous picture.

References

April 2002