"A bright person" and "dark thoughts", "bright memories" and "black deeds" … Good and evil in our minds are archetypally associated with light and darkness. But not quite as is commonly believed, scientists have proven. Perception plays a funny joke: a person who has done a bad thing seeks to "illuminate" the world around him and thinks about light. "Light" enough and twilight.
A group of American psychologists led by Professor Promothesh Chatterjee set up an interesting experiment in which people were asked to recall their recent actions, kind or not. As it turned out, one memory of good or bad affects the perception of the surrounding reality, even at the level of the senses.
“We have found that remembering something abstract, like kindness, changes people’s perception of specific things - for example, the brightness of surrounding flowers,” says Professor Chattirji. Those who thought about unethical actions were literally covered with darkness: it seemed to such subjects that the lamps had been extinguished in the room.
At the next stage of the experiment, psychologists asked the volunteers to choose from the surrounding objects any thing they liked. Some volunteers more often than others fixed their eyes on "illuminating" objects: candles, lanterns and the like. If you think that the luminous objects were chosen by “bright” people (that is, those who remembered about perfect good deeds), then you are mistaken. Those who remembered about the evil, the feeling of "approaching darkness" was so clear that they subconsciously reached for the sources of light.
According to psychologists, guilt and shame came into play here. A bad deed made a person feel pangs of conscience and feel "surrounded by darkness." He tried to get rid of this negative feeling in the most logical way from the point of view of the subconscious - to add light. Chattirjee calls the research results very significant. “We already know that people associate evil with darkness,” he says. "But our research is unique because it showed for the first time that evil makes people not just think about darkness, but see, feel and physically perceive the environment as darker."
A number of legitimate questions arise. If a person who has done something wrong does not grab a candle or torch, does this mean that he is completely shameless, or is he just thinking realistically? Another, even more logical question: is there a feedback? That is, can the illumination of a place affect a person's moral attitudes? Psychologists are going to check the latter in the near future. They are interested in whether it is possible with the help of bright light to drown out the voice of conscience.
Psychologists have long established a connection between a psychological state and perceptual (using the senses) perception. Back in 1965, the following experiment was carried out in the USA. The subjects were given stereoscopes through which they were asked to look at photographs of people in various emotional states.
A stereoscope is a device that allows the subject to simultaneously present two images, one of which he perceives with his left eye, and the other with his right. At the same time, he perceives them as a single volumetric image that corresponds to either the left or right image, or is a combination of them.
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The experimenter randomly inserted pairs of photographs with images of cheerful and angry people into the apparatus, and the subjects assessed the state of the person depicted on them. In fact, they saw two images at once, and their nervous system had a choice: to create an image based on the right or left picture, or to "cross" them and get something in between.
With one group of subjects, the experimenter behaved politely and courteously, with the other, rude and aggressive. The subjects, offended and irritated by the behavior of the experimenter, more often saw angry and angry faces in the stereoscope.
On the contrary, the subjects from the control group, with whom he spoke affably, more often assessed the state of the people in the photographs as joyful and satisfied. These experiments clearly demonstrate that emotions really affect the perception of the surrounding reality, changing the assessment of other people and the visual perception of space.
It is possible that people had negative associations with darkness in ancient times, when our ancestors began to live in the savannas. In these open spaces, primitive people immediately had serious enemies - large cats like a lion, a leopard or a saber-toothed tiger. And they, as we know, attack mainly at night. Although our ancestors had a keen sense of hearing and sense of smell, they hardly always managed to notice the approach of a predator in time - after all, it is almost impossible to detect a creeping cat. Especially in the dark.
The fear of big cats has given rise to a stable association: since something bad always comes out of the dark, then the darkness itself, no doubt, is evil. But it has long been known that such connections work both ways. Roughly speaking, since darkness is associated with something bad, then bad will automatically be associated with darkness. That is why committing a bad deed causes a psychosomatic reaction - it seems to the villain that the world has darkened (with such strong associative connections, this is quite common).
Later, people learned to fight the darkness by creating artificial sources of light - for example, bonfires. When the group gathered at the fire at night, their chances of avoiding the attack of the insidious enemy increased - after all, cats are afraid of flames. This was the point of keeping the fires burning all night - which, at first glance, is somewhat strange in Africa with its very warm climate.
Well, then natural selection joined in, which increased the chances of prosperity for those groups that supported the fire. Predators practically did not attack their members, and, therefore, the groups themselves were more numerous, controlled a large territory and left more numerous offspring.
And although all these events have long sunk into oblivion, the habit of associating darkness with something bad remains with us. As well as a behavioral stereotype that forces us to seek salvation from danger near a light source. As it turned out, these associative connections are still so strong that they affect our visual perception of the world.
Authors: YANA FILIMONOVA, ANTON EVSEEV