Shawn Callahan sometimes shares this little video clip with people without much preamble, and then asks them what they see happening:
OK, most people ascribe human emotions and actions to the shapes. They say things like, “the big triangle was bullying the little triangle and the circle but the little triangle saved the circle.” Or they will ascribe roles to the shapes saying things like “the father didn’t like the boyfriend but despite being pushed away the boyfriend still went out with the girl and the father was angry.”
We like to tell ourselves a story to explain what’s happening rather than merely say they are geometric shapes moving on a two-dimensional plane. And because we tell ourselves a story we feel emotions as the story unfolds. And depending on our surroundings, we will verbalise these emotions.
I love this. It falls into my celery stick collection: At school, I wasn’t much good at biology (the room smelt funny, for one thing). But I remember the experiment where we put a stick of celery into a dish of blue dye. And watched the dye get sucked up by the celery, thereby revealing the mysteries of capillary action. Shawn’s experiment really shows at a fundamental level how emotion and storytelling influence how we understand the world. Reason and emotion are bound together.
Shawn also goes onto to suggest that a byproduct of his experiment is that it gives him a clue about the level of fear among the group he is working with.
Hat tip: Nancy White pointed me to this post. I should have been reading Shawn’s blog anyway!
