Researchers at New York University and Cornell University suggest that our visual mis-perception may actually help motivate us to get out of harm's way. Our heart rate and blood pressure ramp up, and we produce more of the stress hormone cortisol.
The study led by Emily Balcetis, Shana Cole and David Dunning sought to understand this process and put forth what they call the "threat-signal hypothesis."
It posits that we need to become increasingly prepared to act as a threat gets closer, so we're best served by mis-perceiving objects as being closer to us the more threatening they are.
Specifically, the hypothesis suggests that we should misperceive threatening objects as closer than non-threatening objects that evoke equally strong and negative responses, such as disgust.
The researchers tested their hypothesis through a pair of studies. The results showed that the more threatened participants felt, the closer they estimated the tarantula, used in the study, to be.
However, a different effect emerged when considering the effect of disgust. The more disgusted they felt, the further away they estimated the tarantula to be.
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They also recruited 48 female college students to participate in a study on "impressions." When they arrived, the participants met a male student (a confederate in the experiment) they had never seen before.
The results showed that the female students who watched the threatening video estimated that the male student was closer (average 55.0 cm) than the students who watched either the disgusting (average 78.4 cm) or the neutral video (average 73.9 cm).
This relationship held even after the participants' heart rate was taken into account. In both studies, feelings of threat - but not disgust - were consistently related to participants' estimates of distance, providing further evidence in support of the threat-signal hypothesis.