Symmetry

Symmetry is a salient aspect of biological and man-made objects, and has a central role in perceptual organization. Two studies investigate the role of opposition and identicalness in shaping adults' naïve idea of "symmetry". In study 1, both verbal descriptions of symmetry (either provided by the participants or selected from among alternatives presented by the experimenter) and configurations drawn as exemplars of symmetry were studied. In study 2, a pair comparison task was used. Both studies focus on configurations formed by two symmetrical shapes (i.e., between-objects symmetry). Three main results emerged. The explicit description of symmetry provided by participants generally referred to features relating to the relationship perceived between the two shapes and not to geometrical point-by-point transformations. Despite the fact that people tended to avoid references to opposition in their verbal definition of symmetry in study 1, the drawings that they did to represent their prototypical idea of symmetry manifested opposition as a basic component. This latter result was confirmed when the participants were asked to select the definition (in study 1) or the configuration (in study 2) that best fitted with their idea of symmetry. In conclusion, identicalness is an important component in people's naïve idea of symmetry, but it does not suffice: opposition complements it.

* Penultimate draft. Forthcoming in Doyon, M. and T. Breyer (eds.) Normativity in Perception. Palgrave 2015. Please quote only from the published version.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996

Every person or object can be categorized in multiple ways. For example, a person can be categorized (and hence stereotyped) by gender, age, race, or occupation. Earlier research demonstrated that objects toward which people have highly accessible attitudes attract attention when they are present in the visual field. On the basis of that work, the authors hypothesized that categories toward which people have highly accessible attitudes are preferentially applied to multiply categorizable objects. Three experiments, with cued recall and categorization response time as dependent variables, support the hypothesis. Categories toward which people's attitudes had been rendered accessible by an earlier task were more readily produced in response to multiply categorizable objects serving as a cue, or could more quickly be verified as fitting the object. These results demonstrate the power and functional value of accessible attitudes in shaping basic categorization and judgmental processes. Suppose an individual encounters a woman and uses stereotypes to make inferences about her. What traits or other characteristics will be inferred? Now suppose that the target person is not only a woman but is a White woman, noticeably short of stature, who speaks with a strong Southern accent, is 72 years of age, and is expensively but conservatively dressed. Any of these observable characteristics-not only gender-may be associated with stereotypes and therefore may affect the perceiver's reactions to the target. Which stereotype will the perceiver use? Questions like this must arise whenever a perceiver encounters any real person-for a real person is never a member of just one group but always belongs to multiple cross-cutting social groups (based on gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, and so on). Yet the social psychology research literature on stereotyping has almost entirely ignored these questions and has assumed that a target belongs to one and only one group. For example, rather than real people, researchers have used verbal person descriptions such as a woman (vs. a man) or Joan (vs. John) as stimuli in studies of stereotyping, forcing participants to respond to the target's gender alone. Methodologically simplifying the issues in this way made good sense in the initial stages of research on

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Projective terms such as left, right, front, back are conceptually interesting due to their flexibility of contextual usage and their central relevance to human spatial cognition. Their default acceptability areas are well known, with prototypical axes representing their most central usage and decreasing acceptability away from the axes. Previous research has shown these axes to be boundaries in certain non-linguistic tasks, indicating an inverse relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic direction concepts under specific circumstances. Given this striking mismatch, our study asks how such inverse non-linguistic concepts are represented in language, as well as how people describe their categorization. Our findings highlight two distinct grouping strategies reminiscent of theories of human categorization: prototype based or boundary based. These lead to different linguistic as well as non-linguistic patterns.

Citeseer

Compos Mentis: Undergraduate Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics (ISSN: 2330-0264), 2021

In discussions of "beauty" as an aesthetic and evaluative term assessing and describing people's looks, very often people use the term as if there is a shared objective standard of beauty. This mistaken conception of beauty as objective can be understood in three layers: firstly, the term "beauty" is used as if it means that a certain set of objective standards has been met; secondly, it is presupposed that these standards have existed throughout human history and will continue to exist as such even despite what appear to be significant changes to these standards; thirdly, it is often presupposed that we are all equally capable of achieving these standards and that we should all aim to meet these standards. However, this conception of beauty as objective is mistaken. I seek to make clear that: the aesthetics of people's looks is very often shaped by racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and other systematic oppressions in our society. The term "beauty" is much more of an oppressive tool than an innocent realist appraisal or aesthetic judgment.

Springer eBooks, 2018

Beauty and the Norm contains chapters based on empirical research across a wide range of geographical locations and cultural contexts, as well as shorter conversations between scholars that also include more personal reflections. It represents a first attempt to expose the generative operations of human standardization and normative looks in everyday life to more systematic analysis. In doing so, the volume brings together hitherto rather separate debates in critical beauty studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, the history of science and disability studies on the gendered, classed and racialized body, normative regimes of representation and the global beauty economy. In this introductory chapter, we provide a framework that ties the various contributions together, beginning with a brief history of the notion of the norm and of the closely related debates on standardization and normalization, followed by a discussion of the global economy of gendered and racialized bodies.

Personality and Individual Differences, 2016

The present study analyzes how attractiveness affects social norm enforcement in a context of third-party punishment and reward. The authors developed a Third-Party Punishment and Reward Game (TPRG) that consisted of two steps. First, subjects observed a short Public Goods Game between two fictitious players; afterwards they had the opportunity to punish or reward either one or both players. Interfering in the game was costly for the subjects. The eight rounds of the game comprised scenarios that were either stereotype-consistent (attractive cooperators and unattractive free-riders) or stereotype-inconsistent (attractive free-riders and unattractive cooperators). Subjects' emotional responses to each fictitious player were registered. Participants (N = 197) were found to punish attractive free-riders less severely than unattractive ones, whereas attractive cooperators were rewarded more than unattractive ones. Our present findings may support a so-called "beauty priority": attractiveness was highly valued by participants even among players who cheated. Furthermore, the intensity of subjects' emotional responses reflected the amounts of punishment and reward they allocated to players. The above results led to the conclusion that stereotype-consistent scenarios evoke more extreme emotions and interventions than stereotype-inconsistent ones.