ANTICIPATED SOCIAL COST AND INTERPERSONAL ACCOMODATION

The paper is concerned with demonstrating the value of social cost—a concept derived from a social psychological theory of prejudice—in analyzing the cognitive processes underlying the encoding of convergent speech acts. A study showed that when speakers anticipate meeting socially significant others immediately, the effect on their perceptual processes is to perceive greater similarity to, and less undesirable traits in, such others. It was argued that this reduction of a perceived linguistic distance between a speaker and the interlocutor, termed perceptual convergence, should facilitate the adoption of convergent speech in the former. Areas for further research were discussed.     

VISUAL INTERACTION AND DISTANCE

Argyle & Dean (1965) predicted that, as the distance increased between a confederate who stared continuously and a naive subject, so the naive subject would increasingly return the confederate's gaze into the eyes. Their findings were held to support the prediction, but Stephenson & Rutter (1970) offered an alternative explanation. They showed that, in the Argyle & Dean situation, observers are increasingly likely with increasing distance to record as gaze directed at the eyes, gaze which is actually directed away from the eyes. In the present experiment, pairs of naive subjects took up positions equidistant from a one-way screen behind which two cameras were located. Each pair held a 5 min. conversation, nine pairs at 2 ft. apart, nine at 6 ft. and nine at 10 ft. The interactions were recorded on videotape, and four observers subsequently scored Looking and Speech from the recordings for each subject independently. By means of zoom lens photography and a ‘split-screen’ recording technique, it was ensured that any relationship between visual behaviour and distance could not be an artifact of observer performance. The results indicated that, while neither the duration of individuals' Looking nor the number of Looks were significantly affected by distance, the two measures of mutual Looking, namely the duration of eye-contact, and mutual focus (the proportion of a pair's Looking which results in eye-contact), both increased with distance.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: SEEKING A COMMON HORIZON

Abstract. The thought of Bernard Lonergan provides an epistemological position that is both true to the exigencies of modern science and yet open to the possibility of God and revealed religion. In this paper I outline Lonergan's "transcendental method," which describes the basic pattern of operations involved in any act of human knowing, and discuss how Lonergan uses this cognitional theory as a basis for an epistemological position of critical realism. Then I explain how his approach handles some philosophical problems raised by classical and modern science and show how his thought provides an intelligible link between the scientific and religious horizons.