DISCOVERING THE SOURCE OF CONTRADICTORY COMMUNICATIONS.

The article discusses the influence of one's frame of reference on perception and judgment. It is known that two individuals may offer different, even contradictory, interpretations of the same stimulus. Relatively little attention has been devoted to the problems of how the individuals who offer the disparate judgments react to the diversity and of whether, and how, they seek to discover the source of the contradictions. It is with aspects of these problems that this investigation is concerned. Two children, seated facing each other at a table, received a ruler each. Unknown to them, one ruler was based on the metric system (metric ruler) and the other on the English system of linear measurement (linear ruler). The children were told that they were to use one-quarter of an inch as their unit of measurement. They were to report how many of these units fitted into whatever they measured. Most of these subjects evinced their surprise at the disagreement in non-verbal ways, usually by raised eyebrows, expressions denoting perplexity and bewilderment, by sharp glances at one another and at the experimenter, or by voluntarily remeasuring. But occasionally a pair of children showed no overt signs that anything untoward was occurring despite the fact that there was disagreement in every task.