Tales of the Unexpected

Tales of the Unexpected: Reconsidering Formal Innovation

Introduction

In 1949, Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman published the results of an experiment entitled "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm" (Journal of Personality 18 (1949-1950): 206-223). Bruner and Postman devised a "trick card" experiment to study "the perceptual events which occur when perceptual expectancies fail of confirmation--the problem of incongruity" (208). It's their contention that "for as long as possible and by whatever means available, the organism will ward off the perception of the unexpected, those things which do not fit his or her prevailing set" (208).
The experiment works as follows. Subjects are asked to identify what they see when exposed to playing cards projected rapidly on a screen. Some of the cards are normal (e.g., a red six of hearts) and some have been altered (e.g., a black three of hearts). The results of the experiment, cited by such notables as Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, are remarkable, though not entirely unexpected:

1. It took subjects up to four times the amount of exposure time to correctly identify trick cards.
2. Once subjects experience incongruity often enough, they come to expect it and can perceive it when it appears.
3. Prior experience with normal cards does not lead to better recognition performance with incongruous cards.
4. There are four kinds of responses to rapidly presented incongruities:

dominance--perceptual denial of incongruous elements (subjects continue to insist that a black three of hearts is a red three of hearts despite repeated exposure and failure);
compromise--a blending of incongruous elements (subjects report a black three of hearts as a purple three of hearts);
disruption--a gross failure of the subject to organize the perceptual field at a level of efficiency usually associated with a given viewing condition (after repeated failures to correctly identify a trick card, even when viewed for a considerable duration, one subject reported, "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or heart. I'm not even sure now what a spade looks like! My God!).
recognition--the subject correctly recognizes incongruity.

5. The greatest single barrier to the recognition of incongruous stimuli is the tendency for perceptual hypotheses to fixate after receiving a minimum of confirmation. (Once subjects make a decision about a perceptual field, they may fixate on their original choice, regardless of whether or not it is correct.)

What the Bruner-Postman Experiment Has to Do with Rhetoric and Composition

Many of us knew long before E.D. Hirsch enlightened us that we read with our minds as well as our eyes, that expectation and prediction are fundamental processes in communication. The interesting thing about the Bruner-Postman experiment is that it may describe how teachers and students respond to writing whose form is innovative or "incongruous." The dominance reaction is common. When teachers expect students to write poorly, they perceive them writing poorly, dismissing "incongruous" successes. Teachers often report that their students know nothing but the five-paragraph form, though studies by Hasswell and others confirm that when students do use another form, teachers have difficulty perceiving its difference. Or, what may happen more often, teachers pass through a disruption phase. When teachers expect students to adhere to particular formal patterns and to assume specific styles and tones in their writing (to write "academically), they blind themselves to alternatives that may be rhetorically sophisticated, even if they are incongruous with expectations.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has contributed greatly to discussions of paradigmatic changes in our field. Kuhn cites the Bruner-Postman experiment to show that people have great difficulty perceiving anomalies when they haven't been predicted by prevailing theory, when they are unexpected. To cite an example: In 1986 the Los Angeles Times reported scientists' reactions to the first closeup pictures of Halley's Comet,

Scientists in Moscow at first said that the earliest images from Vega 1 [the space probe] suggested that Halley might have two nuclei instead of one--a suggestion that many cometary experts immediately rejected because such a finding would not fit neatly with the current understanding of the way comets behave.

Less than a day later, Soviet scientists said that what had appeared as a second nucleus was gas jetting out from the comet.

But Roald Sagdeyev, director of Moscow's Space Research Institute, told scientists and reporters here that the best images from Vega do, in fact, suggest that the nucleus has a 'double structure.' (March 14, 1986)

Perhaps the lesson for those of us in rhetoric and composition is that we should find ways to appreciate the anomalous, the unexpected, and convey that appreciation to our students. If, as Bruner and Postman suggest, repeated exposure to the incongruous improves one's ability to perceive, then we should consider formal innovation a necessary and vital aspect of improving one's writing.