Therefore, one may suggest that perceptual readiness, or the ease with which items are recognized under less than optimal viewing conditions, reflects not only motivational factors but also the degree of surprise present. That is, perceptual readiness may operate best when matched to the probable sequence of events in the environment expected by the subject.

Nevertheless, the issue of perceptual readiness remains unresolved. Those who are convinced that word meaning or motivational factors are operant in perception have presented evidence to support their position. On the other hand, those who reject the idea maintain they have found no convincing data to support it, and most rely on the thesis that frequency of word usage in the English language relates to and explains variations in perceptual thresholds.

Obtained differences between recognition thresholds of various words can be viewed as supporting either a “frequency” or “motivational” hypothesis. Some current researchers, however, have suggested that evidence today indicates that, while frequency factors demand control in experimental design, they do not supplant motivation-emotional factors.¹⁴

Thus, one may state that, if one attempts to control factors relating to word frequency in a perceptual readiness test, one is justified in attributing obtained differences in recognition thresholds, in part, to motivational factors. 

In relation to the dominant behavioral characteristics associated with Graves’ Level Theory, one may hypothesize that, if one operationally defines and designates certain Levels of Existence, a subject whose behavior has been designated as that of a particular level will recognize words representing the behavior of that level more quickly than the words representing other levels.

METHODS AND PROCEDURE

The S’s were 12 male undergraduates selected from an initial group of 52 on the basis of their scores on a Dogmatism-Rigidity questionnaire. Since it was necessary to employ a means of separating the S’s according to certain personality characteristics representative of the hypothesized levels, a questionnaire was constructed which combined the items of the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale and the Gough-Sanford Rigidity Scale.¹⁵

Rokeach and his co-workers devised a means for measuring individual differences in openness or closedness of belief system, or general authoritarianism and intolerance. Early attempts to investigate authoritarianism, such as the California F-scale, were designed as a general indirect measure of prejudice. The F-scale also attempted to measure underlying personality predispositions toward a fascistic outlook on life. It was found that those who score high on the F-scale also tend to score high on measures of ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Negro feelings, and tend to be politically conservative.

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