Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [331]
Zajonc (pronounced “zye-onts”) was born in Poland, and in 1940, when he was seventeen, fled from the German invaders; his life disrupted, he did not complete his doctorate until he was thirty-five. But despite the late start, he performed a great deal of significant research, especially in social psychology, and won a number of honors. The possessor of a restless mind, he has always preferred to look into questions that he has said “irritate him,” answer them in bold outline, and move on, leaving the details to others.
In the late 1970s Zajonc conducted a number of experiments on the “mere-exposure effect”; this is the human tendency to develop a preference for a stimulus with which we become familiar, even though it has no meaning or value for us. Zajonc showed volunteers a number of Japanese ideographs, some only once, others up to twenty-seven times. He then displayed the ideographs again, asking the volunteers which they recognized and which they liked best. They preferred those they had seen most often, even though the symbols meant nothing to them—and even though they did not recognize them.
Aside from the disturbing implications of the finding—that we can be swayed to like and prefer products or persons merely through the repeated exposure of their names or images—Zajonc saw in it something of scientific import. Affective reactions (feeling states) can occur without cognition, can precede cognitive evaluation, and are more responsible for what we do than cognition. In an article in American Psychologist, which he titled—provocatively, by his own admission—“Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” he came out flatly for the primacy of the physical source of the emotions:
Affect should not be treated as unalterably last and invariably postcognitive. The evolutionary origins of affective reactions that point to their survival value, their distinctive freedom from attentive control, their speed, the importance of affective discriminations for the individual, the extreme forms of action that affect can recruit—all these suggest something special about affect. People do not get married or divorced, commit murder or suicide, or lay down their lives for freedom upon a detailed cognitive analysis of the pros and cons of their actions.72
The article exasperated many cognitive psychologists and created lively controversy. Richard Lazarus, of the University of California at Berkeley, became Zajonc’s chief opponent and vigorously disputed Zajonc’s thesis. In the same journal he offered an array of contrary evidence, the most salient being his own data on how the emotions aroused in volunteers by motion pictures could be altered by versions of the soundtrack that gave different information. Lazarus had used a film of Australian aborigines performing subincision, the ritual slitting of the underside of the penis of a male adolescent with a sharp stone. The film distressed viewers greatly when the soundtrack emphasized its pain and cruelty but far less when the soundtrack stressed how the adolescents looked forward to undergoing the ritual and thereby earning the status and benefits of adulthood. Lazarus’s conclusion:
Cognitive activity is a necessary precondition of emotion because to experience an emotion, people must comprehend—whether in the form of a primitive evaluative perception or a highly differentiated symbolic process—that their well-being is implicated in a transaction, for better or worse. A creature that is oblivious to the significance of what is happening for its well-being does not react with an emotion.73
In fact, he later came to take “the strongest position possible” on the role of cognition in emotion, namely, that it is both a necessary and sufficient condition. “Sufficient means that thoughts are capable of producing emotions; necessary means that emotions cannot occur without some kind of thought.”74
Zajonc and Lazarus continued their debate for some time, but the work of others indicated that both were right and their findings not incompatible.
One such indication is the finding of