The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory --Marilyn Frye

Frye cites some fascinating evidence here which seems to demonstrate that the way in which we perceive the world can affect the way the world is apart from our perception. This isn't a metaphysical claim but a natural account of how we wield and respond to power on a subtle and often unconscious level. Sorry that the excerpt ended up so long, but I have to agree with Chomsky that concision is quite often a vice - especially when challenging the common sense: "the beauty of [concision] is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts"



------- Marilyn Frye's The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory. pages 67-9

How one sees another and how one expects the other to behave are in tight interdependence, and how one expects another to behave is a large factor in determining how the other does behave. Naomi Weisstein, in “Psychology Constructs the Female,” reviewed experiments which show dramatically that this is true.

For instance, in one experiment subjects were to assign numbers to pictures of men’s faces, with high numbers representing the subject’s judgment that the man in the picture was a successful person, and low numbers representing the subject’s judgment that the man in the picture was an unsuccessful person. One group of experimenters was told that the subjects tended to rate the faces high; another group of experimenters was told that the subjects tended to rate the faces low. Each group of experimenters was instructed to follow precisely the same procedure: they were required to read to subjects a set of instructions and to say nothing else. For the 375 subjects run, the results shows clearly that those subjects who performed the task with experimenters who expected high ratings gave high ratings, and those subjects who performed the task with experimenters who expected low ratings gave low ratings.

When experimenters think the rats they are working with were bred for high intelligence, the rats they are working with learn faster; when the experimenters think their rats were bred for low intelligence, the rats learn less well. And children believed by their teachers to have high IQs show dramatic increases in their IQs. Weisstein concludes: “The concreteness of the changed conditions produced by expectations is a fact, a reality…. In some extremely important ways people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.”

The experiments only boldly outline something we well know from experience. Women experience the coerciveness of this kind of “influence” when men perversely impose sexual meanings on our every movement. We know the palpable pressure of a man’s reduction of our objection to an occasion for our instruction. Women do not so often experience ourselves imposing expectations on situations and making them stick, but some of the most awesome stories of women’s successful resistance to male violence involve a woman’s expecting the male assailant into the position of a little boy in the power of his mother. The power of expectations is enormous; it should be engaged and responded to attentively and with care. The arrogant perceiver engages it with the same unconsciousness with which he engages his muscles when he writes his name.

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This has many applications (via Hegel, Marx and Foucault if philosophy's your game) though maybe it’s not as important to go into them here. Something I'd like to suggest is that perhaps one of the greater benefits of this power might come from self-consciously employing it within: adopting a positive/enabling attitude towards oneself. Though this seems pretty common-sensical I think we're regularly encouraged to do the opposite. For instance, if we view our emotions as barbarous (Modernity) or our sensuality, pride & self-love as evil (Christianity) doesn't it seem that we might become more likely to meet those expectations? (I wonder if this might be the case, at least in part, for the pedophile priest, sworn to celibacy). Nietzsche notes: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated -- into a vice.”