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at which people are placed towards one another would also be carefullycontrolled. Depending upon the exact nature of such an experiment, theinstructions will be presented in a standardized form. If the experimenter werefor example, interested in a person’s subjective experience of eye contact, theexperiment could be designed to include a subject (actually a collaborator)who has been instructed to stare into the eyes of one of the other subjectsduring a simulated conversation without the subjects knowing about theinstruction. The duration will be carefully controlled and systematically varied.At the conclusion of the experimental treatment, the naive subject will typicallybe asked to complete a questionnaire in which he or she is required to respondto items relating to issues such as the pleasantness-unpleasantness, and otherrelated dimensions of the experience. It is also possible that the subject’sreactions to the eye contact situation could have been assessed by means ofgalvanic skin reaction, following this the social psychologist will employstatistical analyses in which eye contact, distance, gender, and so on areincluded as either treatment or classification variables, and by these means heor she would arrive at interpretations about the nature of interpersonalperception.It is, therefore, evident that in laboratory situations of this nature, a great dealof effort is expended to ensure that the physical circumstances and thesituations to which the subjects are exposed are controlled as carefully aspossible, and that attempts to attain high levels of accuracy for actual levels ofeye contact under circumstances that have been carefully and systematicallyvaried are, to a large extent, the core of the matter.Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaConceptsEven from these brief summaries we are in a position where it is possible toidentify the manner in which concepts were dealt with. Sartre uses the term legarde which could perhaps, within the context of Sartre’s work, best betranslated as disembodied gaze. According to this analysis, a disembodied gazeis not an attribute of the eye, but rather relates more closely to an individual’sawareness that he or she is being observed. In this analysis Sartre is virtuallytoying with concepts — he bases the meanings with which he endows themupon intuitive experience and thereby creates the opportunity for a wealth ofconnotative meanings.In quantitative studies concepts are less ambiguously defined and used in amore specific manner. In this case the experimenter is dealing with eye contact.Bear in mind that Sartre chose to ignore the role of the eye as a sense organ inhis analysis. Concepts in quantitative investigations such as that described, canbe operationalized to the extent that it is possible to express them in terms ofthe actual number of seconds of actual eye contact as determined by means ofrelatively complicated camera arrangements.166