3 ms·
The paper takes a long time to get to an illustration of its thesis, but the very first example is stunning: There are cultures in the world that are completel
by randomwalker 16y ago
The paper takes a long time to get to an illustration of its thesis, but the very first example is stunning:
There are cultures in the world that are completely unaffected by this illusion - http://goldmark.org/jeff/papers/ridley/html/img1.gif http://goldmark.org/jeff/papers/ridley/html/img1.gif
If something as basic as visual perception is so hugely affected by culture, the paper asks, is there any aspect of psychology that is not? How, then, can we trust the conclusions of studies whose subjects are all drawn from the same, highly unusual cultural group?
I'm glad I stuck with it until I got to this point. Now I have to read the rest of it.
- gwern 16y agoI think the arrow thing may be idiosyncratic. I, as best I can recall, have never seen the top arrow as being longer. Things as important as mental visualization have been denied in all seriousness by great intellectuals; are they lying or are they just different? see http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
- mbateman 16y agoEh, this has been known since at least the 1960s. See Segal, M., Campbell, D., and Herskovits, M. (1966), The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception, Bobbs-Merrill. And I wouldn't call it an example of visual perception being "hugely" affected by cultural. It's a highly peripheral effect, in my opinion. I am definitely on the anti-nativist side of almost everything in psychology, but the rest of this paper is equally hyperbolic.