topics: |  psychology | social | culture |

	I found myself … on a high hill … With me was a Pygmy youth, named
	Kenge … Kenge was then about 22 yr. old, and had never before seen a
	view such as this … Kenge looked over the plains and down to where a
	herd of about a hundred buffalo were grazing some miles away. He
	asked me what kind of insects they were, and I told him they were
	buffalo, twice as big as the forest buffalo known to him. He laughed
	loudly and told me not to tell such stupid stories. (Turnbull, 1961,
	pp. 304–305)

Origins of work on cross-cultural perception : Colour

Early work by W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922), neurologist and anthropologist:
was the first to systematically study cross-cultural perception.
On the people of Torres Straits, between northeastern Australia and New
Guinea...

inhabitants of Murray Island (whose language only has words for the colors
black, white, and red) typically grouped green and blue tiles
together. These findings were typical for other cultures (and languages)
being studied at the time, and prompted the Whorf Hypothesis, which
explicitly states that language determines our experience.

However, research has not fully supported this hypothesis. Rosch (1973)
examined the color discrimination of the Dani tribe of Papua, New Guinea,
and determined that although the language only has two terms (one for all
dark colors and one for all light colors), the Dani were able to
discriminate several colors from one another. This occurred even though,
when given a sorting task, members of the Dani tribe typically sorted the
color tiles into two groups. Davies and Corbett (1997) examined color
sortings from native speakers of English, Russian, and Setswana. Though
Russian has two words for blue (one for light blue and one for dark blue),
the sortings from English and Russian speakers were very similar. The
Setswana speakers, however, tended to sort the blues and greens together,
and they used only one word for these colors.

It seems, then, that language does not drive perception, but perhaps the
importance of having particular words for different colors in a language is
dependent upon the need for communicating those colors among individuals.

The Müller-Lyer Illusion

German psychiatrist Franz Müller-Lyer created this illusion in 1889 (Bermond
& Van Heerden, 1996).

W.H.R. Rivers sought to determine the effect of the Müller-Lyer illusion on
three groups of Murray Islanders: men, boys, and girls. At the time it was
believed that the Murray Islanders (being less "civilized") would be more
susceptible to the illusion (that is, make greater errors). Participants
were given a brass slide with convergent arrowheads (set at a standard
length of 75 mm, and depicted as segment ‘A’) that contained an inner slide
with a divergent arrowhead at one end.

Rivers tested the three groups of Murray Islanders (men, boys, and girls) and
compared their performance to three groups of English participants (students,
adults, and schoolchildren). Interestingly, the Murray Islanders performed better
than their English counterparts (they more accurately slid the guide so that the
line segments had equal length).

 
Subjects have to slide the right half until segments A and  B have equal length.  
Murray islanders did better than Europeans. 

Testing across broader cultural groups

Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits (1966) tested more than 1,300 people in 17
different groups, including children (aged 6–11) from 12 of the
groups. Most of the participants (more than 1,000) were from 10 different
African countries, one small sample comprised Europeans in South Africa,
another small sample included Hanunóo people in the Philippines, and 264
individuals were included in two American samples.

Segall et al. found substantial differences among the groups. Data were
reported based on the percentage greater line AB had to be before it was
judged equal to line CD. Kalahari Bushmen and adult workers in South
African gold mines showed virtually no effect of the illusion at all (their
error sensitivity was 1%, meaning that they correctly judged when the two
line segments were of equal length). The groups most susceptible to the
illusion were the two American samples: a group of university students and
children and adults from Illinois.

This pattern of results clearly demonstrated differences between groups.
Moreover, the results also showed that children (regardless of group) were
more susceptible to the illusion than adults, with the proportional
difference between children and adults for any cultural group being fairly
systematic (the correlation between children's and adults’ ratings for all
groups was 0.81). Segall et al. (1966) proposed the "carpentered-world
hypothesis," which states that children who grow up and live in squared,
city-block environments and rectangular buildings are more susceptible to the
illusion (Figure 8.3).

How could one determine whether the differences reported by Segall et al.
(1966) are due to culture (specifically, a carpentered world) or due to
genetics? (It is apparent that the groups studied by Segall differed
genetically.)

Pedersen and Wheeler (1983) did the next best thing: they tested 20 members
of the Navajo Indian tribe, 10 of whom lived until at least age 6 in a hogan
(the typical Navajo rounded house), and 10 of whom lived in a rectangular
house. The results were consistent with predictions from the
carpentered-world hypothesis—those Navajo students reared in rectangular
houses were more susceptible to the Müller-Lyer illusion than those raised in
the hogan. Other studies incorporating Chinese participants have also shown
support for the carpentered-world hypothesis (Dawson, Young, & Choi, 1973).

Culture and picture perception

ce suggests that Western (industrialized) cultures have far greater
three-dimensional perception, and many African subjects interpret ostensibly
3D-images as flat.  Thus, they are more easily able to copy an image of the
trident, since it doesn't confuse them.

This suggests that some aspects of perception are not innate, but acquired
based on cultural exposure.

William Hudson on Bantu's of Zambia

Anthropologist William Hudson showed pictures like this one:


 
Hudson asked children and adults questions such as "What is the man doing?".
many native Africans would say he was about to spear the elephant, ignoring
the depth cues.


Hudson also observed that pre-school western children also tended to make
similar judgments.
Hudson suggested that 'habitual exposure to pictures play a large role' in
pictorial perception.

Cultural ambiguities in cross-cultural research

[However, Hudson's practices in collecting data have been challenged, see
JM Kennedy's  searing critique of Hudson's methods in his
Psychology of Picture Perception, Chapter 5:

	It is not surprising that many of Hudson's subjects seemed to base
	their replies to his question on logical argument, avoiding relying
	on weak perceptual cues. For example, some subjects argued that a man
	would not attack an elephant with a spear, so if the man in a picture
	was throwing a spear, it must be at the antelope, not the elephant in
	the picture. Some subjects told Hudson, flatly, that the pictures
	were ambiguous.

	If he wanted to question them about the pictures, the subjects said,
	he should tell them which view they should take.

	Hudson did not discuss the sophistication of his subjects with
	tests. He did not say whether his subjects were all equally at
	ease. But surely when a white man pulls a black laborer away from his
	daily work and sits down in an office with the laborer, and begins to
	show the laborer little pictures, the laborer begins to feel a little
	anxious.  Especially when the setting is South Africa, the laborer
	must be uncomfortable. 

	To make matters worse, the white man waits unhelpfully through long
	periods without deigning to assist the laborer in answering the odd
	questions the white man is asking.  Hudson reports that at times the
	response was given by thesubject after a lag of one hour! What fears
	were in the laborers' minds we can only guess at. p.73