http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/phenomlect.

html

LECTURE ON PHENOMENOLOGY

Outline:
A. Overview and Philosophy of Phenomenology
B. Phenomenological Methods and How to Use Them
C. Examples of Phenomenological Research
D. Additional vocabulary
E. Experience, Communication, and Society
A. OVERVIEW AND PHILOSOPHY

GOAL OF PHENOMENOLOGY: To try to help us get at the world that exists prior
to our conceptualizing it. The "LIFE-WORLD" of experience as lived by them. We
begin with the "NAIVE," PRE-THEORETICAL, PRE-THEMATIZED, PRE-RE-
FLECTED UPON world of the subject.

Here are a few words of orientation from one of the reviews mentioned above:

For those not familiar with the phenomenological approach, the term refers to a
particular group of perspectives and methodologies for carrying out qualitative
investigation. These perspectives existed for some time in philosophy before
psychological investigators developed a set of methods to go with them.
Amodeo Giorgi has termed these methods a "human science" approach, in con-
trast with the dominantly behavioral and analytically cognitive "natural sci-
ence" approaches favored by academic psycholology. These two sets of atti-
tudes and methods in regard to psychological investigation, one oriented to-
ward "predicting and controlling behavior," in John B. Watson's words, and the
other toward studying consciousness as it is experienced, in oneself or in
someone else, are quite different epistemologies.
Clinical epistemologies are another different matter yet, and themselves differ
sharply from one another. Dominant on the American scene is the analytic/diag-
nostic epistemology that represents a mixture of Freud and the medical tradi-
tion, while another quite different approach is the existential-phenomenological
epistemology represented by such figures as Rollo May, James Bugenthal, R.D.
Laing, Thomas Szasz, and William Glasser. ...As we will see below, Gestalt ther-
apy and person-centered therapy fall into this latter class of existential-phe-
nomenological approaches. In short, these epistemologies present several fun-
damentally different ways of going about the matter of comprehending human
behavior and exprience.

DEFINITIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY:

(1) A description of the givens of immediate experience.

(2) An attempt to capture experience in process as lived, through descriptive
analysis. It studies how things appear to consciousness or are given in experi-
ence, and not how they are in themselves, even if it is known that the given
contains more than or is different from what is presented. (For instance, as-
sault victims may experience fear for months or years after the assault, even
when no apparent danger exists. What does this fear mean? Where does it
come from? How is it experienced? The answers bring us closer to the phenom-
enon that is lived.

(3) A method of knowing that "begins with the things themselves, that tries to
find a 'first opening' on the world free of our perceptions and interpretations, to-
gether with a methodology for reducing the interference of our preconceptions.

(4) A method of learning about another person by listening to their descriptions

of what their subjective world is like for them, together with an attempt to un-
derstand this in their own terms as fully as possible, free of our preconceptions
and interferences.

In ordinary life, we "capture" and conceptualize everything, using our precon-

ceptions to turn everything into something other than it actually is, one or two
steps removed from direct unfiltered experience. Phenomenology strives to
clarify our receiving abilities and rediscover the actuality of what is.
THE EXISTENTIAL DIMENSION: Phenomenology is a way of unfolding the di-
mensions of human experience&emdash;how we exist in, live in, our world. It
examines:

a. What is distinct in each person's experience

b. What is common to the experience of groups of
people who have shared the same events or circumstances
Existence: from the greek word ekstere: means "to stand out toward." Existen-
tialism focuses on reflecting the deepest structure of human experience. Phe-
nomenology developed as a method for exploring that experience.

THE BASIC DATA: EXPERIENCES are the basic data with which the phenome-
nologist works. The experiences of another can be known. Our job is to make
them "visible" and true to the subject's own ways of living them.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH: Says that we need to continually exam-

ine and reexamine our biases and presuppositions. The attitude is, "I want to
understand your world through your eyes and your experiences so far as possi-
ble, and together we can probe your experiences fully and understand them.

In this sharing of experiences, in this dialogue, is the "betweenness" we're

looking at in phenomenology. It is based on the fact that the experience of oth-
ers is somehow accessible to us. We can enter into it, into an intimate dia-
logue. A theme that runs through it is that of interconnectedness.

THE POINT OF VIEW in phenomenology is always the experiencing person (sub-

ject, co-investigator.)
BEHAVIOR AND EXPERIENCE: There has been historic controversy in psychol-
ogy whether the subject matter studied should be consciousness (the internal
viewpoint) or behavior (the external viewpoint.

Reacting against William James and the Structuralists, the behaviorists viewed
personal experience as so unreliable and variable that it wasn't even worth in-
cluding in psychology. Some others viewed this as throwing the baby out with
the bathwater.
Husserl, around the turn of the century, designed phenomenology as a kind of
philosophical foundation for all the scientists who had anything to say about
what it means to be human. It involved paying attention to our own experience
in such a way that you can describe it as fully and completely as possible.
In phenomenology there is no rigid dichotomy. It sees both behavior and con-
sciousness as necessary to psychology. Both are seen as different aspects of
the same phenomenon--the world as lived by our subject. This is a very differ-
ent alternative to the modernist, positivist notion of science that most of us
grew up with, namely that there are two ways to deal with anything&emdash;a
subjective way (not worth much, in the positivist view), and an objective way
(real truth, in the positivist view.)
A DEEPER LOOK

In the review published together with Arie Cohen's, I tried to get into the world
of the phenomenologist as follows:

"Edmund Husserl, generally considered the founder of phenomenology, who ar-

gued that we can study experience 'rigorously and systematically on the basis
of how it appeared to consciousness.' Husserl began with "the phenomenon it-
self." A later phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, spoke of a "first open-
ing" on things, before any intervening screen of concepts and ideas appears.
Developing this ability to let go of our mental chatter, our conceptual cate-
gories, and all else that is spinning around in the vortexes of our minds is the
goal at which Zen Buddhist training aims—a direct encounter with reality, and
nothing more, such as:
"The frog jumps from the lily pad into the pond. Plop."
"But what does it mean?" someone asks.
"Don't you see? The frog jumped. The water splashed, making a sound. Ripples
radiated outward from the spot. The frog disappeared. Period."

". . . Husserl also included another element in his phenomenology. In his view,
experience includes both those concrete particulars of this situation here now,
experienced as naievely as we can experience them, and the categories of
meaning to which its things and events belong. A Red Delicious and a Fuji, for
example, share the category of meaning that we might call "appleness."
(Shades of Plato's pure forms!) These categories of meaning are "structures" in
consciousness that are invariant and essential. Husserl used the term
"essence," for them, setting the stage for Jean-Paul Sartre's famous existential
dictum that "existence precedes essence." Apparently unknown to Husserl, Ti-
betan Buddhists for hundreds of years had been observing and recording such
operations of the mind in a rather sophisticated fashion. In Open Secrets, Wal-
ter Truett Anderson (1979) has provided a marvelous summary of this work."
COMMUNCIATION AND EXPERIENCE

The possibility of describing was viewed by some as essentially identical to the

process of communicating. Describing something implies the faith that you can
communicate it. (A criticism of that view is that it leaves out the nonverbal di-
mensions of communication.)

This view that communication is implie in any act of expriencing or knowing

something. This led Husserl to the notion of "inter-subjectivity" as a fundamen-
tal component of human existence. This can be seen as the other side of Or-
tega y Gassett's concept of "radical solitude."

The notion that ultimately there is nothing we can communicate but our own
experience, even if it is an experience of looking at a phenomenon through a
technological instrument and interpreting it, is a very different way of looking
at social reality from the modernist view.
The process of paying attention implies a process of communicating, and there-
fore there is a sort of fundamental existential/social quality to everything we
experience. Our experience is based on a faith, as you will, in the possibility of
communication. This was a fundamental influence on the development of exis-
tential philosophy and psychology in Europe and Humanistic psychology in the
U.S.

As events unfolded, existentialism came to be used primarily as a description

for an attitude and orientation toward one's own personal experience, (and
also, secondarily, toward that of others.) Phenomenology became primarily a
set of methods and attitudes for the study of the conscious experience of oth-
ers. Phenomenology is more purely epistemological and methodological, while
existential philosophy and psychology in their various incarnations have a
spectrum of other philosophical dimensions.
B. THE METHODS

PRACTICAL QUESTION: How do you apply the idea of phenomenology, of appre-

ciating things in an unbiased manner, in concrete situations?

THE RESEARCH APPROACH INCLUDES THESE PRINCIPLES:

Don't test hypotheses

Don't use a theoretical model to determine the question. "PRIMACY OF THE
LIFE-WORLD" means that our approach to understanding is "pre-theoretical."
(Yes, in a sense of course this is a contradiction because we are describing a
theory. But the theory includes methods to minimize its impact on The nature
of the data obtained.)
Try to come as close as you can to understanding the experiences being lived
by the participants as they do.
There is no claim that phenomenological results are predictive or replicable.
Several studies that probe the same phenomenon may discover similar mean-
ings, each describedfrom a unique perspective. These perspectives may also
lead to the discovery of new and different meanings.
DESCRIBE, DESCRIBE, DESCRIBE is a key part of the phenomenological orien-
tation. The people in question tell their own story, in their own terms. So "fi-
delity to the phenomenon as it is lived" means apprehending and understanding
it in the lived context of the person living through the situation.

BRACKETING is suspending or setting aside our biases, everyday unerstand-

ings, theories, beliefs, habitual modes of thought, and judgments. Part of the
larger process of epoche´.

Since bias is an inevitable part of the study of human beings, phenomenologists

deal with it by putting it completely in the situation, by attemping to become
aware of theiir preconceptions and biases before beginning the study and while
the study is occurring, and then "bracketing" or suspending them so as to be as
open as possible to what the subject wants to share.
EPOCHE´: Learning to look at things in a way such that we see only what
stands before our eyes, only what we can describe and define.

FACTICITY: a belief in factual characteristics of real objects. In phenomenol-

ogy, by bracketing our facticity, we transfer our focus from assumed things
"out there" to our experience.

"FIRST OPENING": (A direct experience of a person, object, or event, before any

of our mental screens of filters change it.)

"PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION" is (1) an attempt to suspend the ob-

server's viewpoint. (2) Hearing another person's reality and focusing on the
central, dominant, or recurring themes which represent the essential qualities
or meanings of that person's experience.

FOUR APPROACHES TO PHENOMENOLOGY ARE:

INDIVIDUAL PHENOMENOLOGY: Researchers use their own actual and imati-

nary experiences and others' factual and fictional written accounts and theo-
ries to develop a thematic description of a phenomenon. This involves INTRO-
SPECTION: a method of inner observation which involves assuming an external
viewpoint toward oneself, stating the facts about oneself as others might if
they could observe what the introspector observes.

EMPIRICAL PHENOMENOLOGY: the researcher examines descriptions written

by the co-researcher, and thematizes after collecting the descriptions. In "Em-
pirical and hermeneutic approaches to phenomenological research in psychol-
ogy," (2001), Serge Hein and Wendy Austin write about the use of bracketing in
empirical phenomenology:

"Any time a preconception or personal reaction surfaces, the researcher brack-

ets it, sets it aside, and tries to comprehend the person's experience as it is for
that person. In this process of "phenomenological reduction," the researcher
tries to suspend his or her conceptions of any world other than the subjective
world of the person who is being studied. Afterward, the researcher goes
through and extracts major themes that are repeated again and again. Then the
researcher may or may not discuss these themes with the "co-researcher" for
verification or amplification. ("Co-researcher" is a term often used instead of
"subject" in phenomenological research.) Finally, the researchers look to see
what common themes occur among the various participants in the study, or
whether there are clusters of one kind of theme in one group and another kind
of theme in another group."

Arie Cohen (2001) describes the steps in this approach as follows:

The steps of analysis involve in this approaches are:

1. Immersion in the data which requires reading the transcript several times.
2. The statements that are relevant to the phenomenon are identified and the-
matized.
3. These excerpts and themes are used to develop an exhaustive description of
the participant experience of the phenomenon. This description is often re-
ferred to as " situated structural description" (SSD). If there are more than one
participant, then additional SSDs are made for each participant, and they are
compared in order to identify shared themes and a synthetic general structural
description.
The characteristics of the empirical phenomenology are:
1. Emphasis on commonality that is present in the many diverse appearances
of the phenomenon.
2. Reliance on the actual words of the participants
3. Explicitness about the design and the steps taken to obtain the findings.
4. These characteristics leads to verifiability and ability to be replicable.
5. Stressing more on rigor of the approach than on its creative aspects.
6. Acceptance that hermeneutic activity (interpretation) is intrinsic process of
research

THEMATIZING is examining the central and subsidiary themes that recur in the
report of the co-researcher.

Part of the method is to try to uncover the LAYERS OF MEANING in phe-

nomenology.
Seemingly irrelevant contents in the interviews which were originally over-
looked may be later seen as important clues to themes and feelings that were
not initially perceived. This may include observed behaviors, and tensions and
gaps in the interview that Giorgi has pointed out can indicate hidden meanings.
When the group of respondents is large enough, a researcher may pay explicit
attention to whether there are subgroups who cluster around certain themes
and others that cluster around others.
DIALOGICAL PHENOMENOLOGY linvolves interview of the co-researcher, and
involving the co-researcher in thematizing during the interview. The researcher
may explicitly pay attention to and refer to observations of the co-researcher's
behavior as well as to the co-researcher's descriptions of experience. Since my
descrption of this process in the aforementioned review is clearer than the pre-
vious one in this lecture, I insert it here:
A major phenomenological method which their article leaves out, dialogical
phenomenology, is of particular interest here for two reasons. One is that it is
the easiest to incorporate into a class or training program, and the other is that
it is closer to clinical or counseling intervention than either empirical or herma-
neutical phenomenology. One person interviews the other while bracketing his
or her own personal reactions as fully as possible, and then after the interview,
goes back over the interview notes and involves the co-researcher in the the-
matizing process. I have found that this usually works marvellously, and often
has a profound effect on participants, even when done as a class exercise. The
minimim practical time is an hour, although longer is better. The researcher in-
terviews the co-researcher about some matter important to the latter, while
bracketing her own feelings and trains of personal association, for twenty min-
utes. Then the researcher involves the co-researcher in the thematizing
process, right there on the spot. After that they reverse roles. (It can also be
done as an outside-class task with no time pressure.) In their subsequent
writeup, each person describes the co-researcher's experiential world as it was
articulated, identifies the major themes, and describes how the process was
for him or her, including any difficulties encountered.

In the class assignment to carry out a dialogical (based on the word "dialogue")
interview, the interviewee or "co-researcher" chooses a subject of sufficient in-
terest that he or she will be able to talk about it for half an hour. The inter -
viewer or "researcher" then listens to the co-researchers comments and takes
notes. Notes may be taken about verbal content and also about emotional ex-
pression and body language that amplifies the verbal meaning. The central tool
that the researcher will use during the interview is bracketing. Some people
can do this easily and others really struggle with it. When something the co-re-
searcher is saying evokes a reaction in you, "put brackets around it and set it
aside" for the time being, because your goal is to comprehend the co-re-
searcher's ways of thinking and feeling as fully as possible, and your reactions
are likely to get in the way of that.

It is OK to ask questions, or to use Rogerian reflection of content or feeling, but

do so sparingly and don't be afraid of a minute or two of silent reflection. If your
reaction validates something the co-researcher is saying, a very brief, one-line
self disclosure saying something like, "That happened to me with my mother
too," is OK, but no more than that. KEEP THE SPOTLIGHT ON THE CO-RE-
SEARCHER. Don't shift it to your reaction even when it's a validating one.

Then after the interview, you will go over the interview together with the co-re-
searcher. You will look for and identify themes in your notes, articulate them,
and your co-researcher will say either, "Yes, that's just right," or "Not
exactly..." and will help you rephrase the theme to get it as accurate as possi-
ble. There will probably be several principal themess that recur again and again
in the transcript. Follow the instructions in the assignment in preparing your
writeup of the interview.

HERMANEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
Cohen states, "Hermeneutic phenomenology is concerned with understanding
texts. In this approach the researcher aims to create rich and deep account of
a phenomenon through intuition, while focusing on uncovering rather than ac-
curacy, and amplification with avoidance of prior knowledge. In using this ap-
proach we accept the difficulty of bracketing. To overcome this difficulty we
acknowledge our implicit assumptions and attempt to make them explicit. In
addition, we accept the notion that there may be many possible perspectives
on a phenomenon, like when we turn a prism, one part becomes hidden and an-
other part opens. Hermeneutic avoids method for method' s sake and does not
have a step by step method or analytic requirements. The only guidelines are
the recommendation for a dynamic interplay among six research activities:
commitment to an abiding concern, oriented stance toward the question, inves-
tigating the experience as it is lived, describing the phenomenon through writ-
ing and rewriting, and consideration of parts and whole."

My review added, "Heidegger's phenomenology took a hermaneutical turn. In a

sense, he denied the possibility of a naive "direct grasp" of the phenomena
themselves, arguing that we necessarily interpret everything in terms of our
language and experience. And so, in trying to understand another person, I
need to look at my own preconceptions and be as explicit about them as I can.
I may move back and forth between someone's description of her experience
and my own, and refer to literature and what others have written about similar
experiences. This dialectical interplay of sets of experiences is what is called
'hermaneutical.'

A Hermaneutic approach can be added to the Individual Phenomenology

method and can enrich it.

C. EXAMPLES OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

1. THE ASTHMA STUDY

This study by Frank Siroky used empirical phenomenology, the analysis of inter-
view transcripts.
"We break it down into the particular meaning units.
Again and again the asthmatics used the words 'alone, apart, separate, suffo-
cating, don't.'

We began to ask, "Is asthma the cause of all this? Or is there a style of life that
is deeper? We might spend several hours going over one interview.

"Comparing two transcripts, we find that one woman says, 'The asthma gov-
erns my life.' Another person talks about her life, of which asthma is one dimen-
sion.

We begin to discern how people STRUCTURE THEIR EXPERIENCE --patterns

that hang together.

2. ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING
(Frank Siroky)"As a consultant, I began using the methods of traditional indus-
trial psychology. Make changes in the workingplace, and as a result, motivation
and productivitgy will increase. It was a nice model, paid well, and it didn't
work.

In Scandanavia, I visited institutes that viewed making changes as a DIA-

LOGUE. A dialogic relationship among all the people in their workingplaces.
QWL and industrial democracy. Critics said, "You're preaching socialism." They
replied, "No, we're preaching democracy."

Now, on the pages of every business magazine we find such models, written
about as new ways organizations can develop to become moree competitive,
etc.

New models: How we can help people in the workingplace to change their own
lives.

When I use phenomenology in consulting, I spend time walking around the plant
talking to people asking them what their experience of their working life is.
Then we combine that wifrom different levels and parts of the organization
have a chance to share their experiences."

Focus groups: another kind of applied phenomenology. David Van Nuys has
done a lot of these for corporate clients.

3. CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION (Wertz, 1985)

(Read from separate notes.)

D. OTHER VOCABULARY

meaning: Lies in the relationship between a person and his or her world of ob -
jects.
noema: the appearance of an object or or item as the perceiving subject appre-
hends it.
noetic: harboring a meaning or meanings of some sort.
noesis: How beliefs are acquired; how it is that we are experiencing what we
are experiencing.
ontology: the study of our mode and process of being and existing in the world
intentionality: consciousness actively reaches out toward the object in a di-
rected way.
world-design: the all-encompassing pattern of a person's mode of being in the
world.
verstehen (German for "to understand"). Through influence and empathy people
can understand each other. Experience is not just hidden inside the person, but
appears in the words, on our faces, and in our language.
Umwelt, mitwelt, and eigenwelt: Umwelt: biological or physical surroundings or
landscape. Mitwelt: the human environment; Eigenwelt: the person himself or
herself, including the body and inner psychological reality.
intersubjectivity: The process of several, or many people, coming to know a
common phenomenon, each through his or her subjective experience, and relat-
ing their experiences to each other.
objectivism: positing the procedures of the natural sciences as THE procedures
for establishing objectivity and conducting science.
E. PHENOMENOLOGY AS A BASIS FOR SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

(From dialogue with Art Warmoth.) The notion is that social reality is always
composed of persons in society, as though that were a single word. Not as if
persons are clumped together in society, but rather it is a way of describing a
fundamental structure of social reality. People are always in some sense in a
society, and are also always in a situation.

Closed and open attitudes. Closed: an approach of constant narrowing or zero-

ing in on a phenomenon. Open: Consists of gaps as well as "filled" sections, and
we remain open to notice what happens and evolves. Social psychologist Mil-
ton Rokeach studied this in detail.

It's important to pay attention to our experience, and especially to others' ex-
perience because in a sense that's the main source of data available to us.
Sometimes it's about all we've got.
In order to begin the study of any situation or social issue, it is fundamental to
try to understand the experience of the people who are caught in the situation
you are concerned with. This includes thoughts, feelings,
sensations&emdash;the whole thing. Studying people's behavior is important
but it is not enough, because it leaves out important dimensions of experience
and meaning that lead to that behavior.

This is very different from placing our primary emphasis on measuring objective
behavior. What's happening with reinforcers and discriminative stimuli do not
tell us all there is to know about a situation, or the person's history in regard to
it.

Some examples of this from the family therapy literature. In some families, for
instance, there is no room for the expression of real emotion if it does not fit
the prescriptions of the family's dominant emotional theme or themes. If what's
allowed is only anger, assertiveness, or a deadpan front, the overt expression
of tenderness or affection may not be allowed. Paying attention only to the be-
havior can leave out centrally important dimensions of people's inner experi-
ence. Similar dynamics occur on the larger social stage. Or take another exam-
ple&emdash;"crossing generation boundaries." In this case the child is often
made to feel as if he or she is responsible for the adults' feelings and well be-
ing. Again, there is much more than observable behavior going on. This is not to
deny the importance of behavior, but to emphasize that it is not the whole
story.

We could make the interesting observation that the dynamics observed in dys-
functional families are directly correlated with a set of dysfunctional assump-
tions about the relative values of subjective and objective truths. We can trace
this back to the start of the moder period in the 17th and 18th century, starting
with Descartes' argument that mind and body are distinct and separate, rather
than interrelated.

The realms of subjective knowing and objectively measurable knowing are

largely different realms of reality, and the upshot of the development of this
kind of dualism ended up being a distinct preference for looking at objectively
observable behaviors, whether we are paying attention to organizational, politi-
cal, or family systems. This has, however, led to a number of significant dead
ends, and now is beginning to change.
In more traditional cultures, there tends to be a widely shared set of assump-
tions about the meaning of various behaviors. This is less true in the pluralistic
western industrial cultures of America and Northern Europe which have a high
degree of social and cultural mobility. With no implication of relatively good or
bad, right or wrong in this case, in traditional cultures there is more of a shared
history of common experience and shared meanings. A "community of mean-
ings" is taken for granted by most of the members of the society. But speaking
about some of the shared experiences that are involved may be forbidden, such
as in cultures where women are severely repressed.

In areas like physics and chemistry, objective science and the techbnology
built on it is highly appropriate in a broad variety of circumstances. But we
have tended to apply this model also to the social sciences where it fits some
phenomena and situations and not others, and partly as a result have ended up
creating a lot of organizational systems that are pretty dysfunctional in terms
of their ability to meet human needs.

In some quarters there appear to be substantial restructurings going on, in

which we realize that listening to peoples' subjective experiences in regard to
the conditions society is creating for them is extremely important. Part of this
involves looking at questions of value and values as a central issue for investi-
gation, instead of dominant social groups blindly and automatically assuming
that their own values will produce good lives and experiences for everyone. In
this view, the right way to do psychology is to look at what's going on in peo -
ple's experience as well as how they behave, and before you run out trying to
change anything, and especially social policies that everyone has to live with,
you make sure you understand as fully as possible the history of events that led
people to their present behavior, positions, and experiences of the world. You
find out what they're thinking and feeling.

In a polarized situation where people are in conflict, there are two general
choices:

Decide that your side is in fact correct and retreat to a position of might makes
right, that war or violence of some sort is a legitimate way of resolving the is-
sue. This is basically taking a win-lose position--that "my side has gotta win."

An alternative is to assume that we're dealing with an incomplete understand-

ing of the situation, and find out how it looks to those on the other side, what
their experience of the situation is. Notice the profound difference between
"We have an incomplete understanding of the situation," and "We have a cor-
rect understanding of the situation." There is the ever-so-common tendency (to
which I still fall victim sometimes myself) to hear one person tell about a situa-
tion, and then move toward action without taking time to listen to the other
side or sides. Phenomenology reminds us to do our best to understand the
other person's experience, rather than jumping to a conclusion based on incom-
plete information.