Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1980

Thesis Director

Richard L. Hummel

Abstract

A careful search of the literature in the areas of anthropology, psychology, and sociology has failed to bring to light more than a very few empirical studies confirming or denying the existence of a relationship between eye gaze patterns and individual's view of the world around and within them. Our study is designed to address this social psychological question.

The seminal work of Silvan Tomkins in the area of ideology has had a great effect on this study. For introductory purposes, we have used his definition of the concept of ideology: "By ideology I will mean any organized set of ideas about which human beings are at once most articulate and most passionate, and for which there is no evidence and about which they are least certain" (1965: 73).

The basic design centers on a dyadic (two person) interview situation consisting of one subject and one interviewer, and a video camera trained on the face of the subject in order to record major eye movements. An ideology scale, as described in Chapter III, was administered verbally. This setting placed the subject in a social situation with every opportunity to interact behaviorally with the interviewer. The eye movement patterns and their association with ideology scales were thus recorded.

As this study crosses several disciplinary lines, no one theory will be labeled and detailed qua theory, although several perspectives will be referred to. We accepted a communication theoretical model with: the components of a sender, a receiver, an object, information, and media of transmission; the relationship between the sender and the object; and the interaction or sharing relationship between sender and receiver, mediated through one or more transmission channels and termed "communication".

We have selected six basic scales that define axes of world view. One scale is included, also, for its utility in controlling for content, in the assessment of structure when using the other five. A recurrent problem noted with some of the scales is that of response bias. We have included a seventh scale not designed to measure world view, but rather to measure agreement response bias. Principal components analysis, a non-inferential factor analytic technique, was chosen for the creation of factor scales from our data.

Our major research question is based on the assumption that people exhibit regular patterns of eye gaze movements. These patterns could then be used to classify a person as a left- or a right- looker. Other patterns could aid in speech flow and synchronization. We hoped to establish the existence of such patterns and associate these with ideological content in a verbal flow. Additionally, we desired to replicate facets of other research and affirm the conclusions of those scientists.

Our achievement record with respect to these goals is far from perfect. The only part of our major hypothesis that we were able to substantiate is that eye movements do covary with speech flow, but only in terms of frequency, not in directional variation. No directional regularities were found to establish people as left- or right- lookers. Some significant correlations support the hypothesis that directional eye movements are linked to ideology, however this conclusion is not strongly supported, because the patterns discerned are the opposite of that suggested by the literature.

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