by Adam Alter
Why should this have mattered? Because over years and years, people who live in hard, geometric interiors become used to judging the size of objects based on the rules of three-dimensional visual perspective. For example, if you were inside this room and you had to decide which of the two walls highlighted with thick black lines, A and B, was taller, which would you pick?
From years of living indoors in structures with perpendicular walls, you know without even paying attention that the two walls are the same height. Wall A is closer to you, so it casts a larger image on your retina, at the back of your eye, but you’re so familiar with the basic principles of perspective that you correct for that difference. The lines that Wall A creates where it meets the floor and ceiling are similar to Line A in the Müller-Lyer illusion, and the lines that Wall B creates are similar to Line B. When you see configurations like Line A, you’re reminded of objects that are close to you and aren’t actually as large as they appear; in contrast, configurations like Line B remind you of objects that are far away and are actually larger than they appear. In your head, you make those corrections automatically, so Line B looks longer than it is (just as Wall B is taller than it looks), and Line A looks shorter than it is (just as Wall A is shorter than it looks). These intuitions are bound up in cultural experience, and the Bushmen, Suku, and Bete didn’t share those intuitions because they had rarely been exposed to the same geometric configurations.
Many of these cultural differences stretch back millennia. Ancient Greek philosophers, who formed the basis for much modern Western philosophy, tended to analyze objects in isolation from their contexts, whereas ancient Chinese philosophers were far more concerned with the relationship between an object and its context. Thousands of years later, these differences continue to express themselves in how Westerners and East Asians perceive the world.
In one experiment, researchers asked Chinese and American students to study a series of photos that featured a central object against a background. For example, one of the photos featured a tiger standing by a stream in a forest, and a second photo featured a fighter jet against an alpine backdrop. Later, the experimenters showed the students a new series of photos and asked them whether they had seen the object in the foreground during the first phase of the experiment. Most of the students were pretty good at the task, answering correctly on 70 percent of the trials. But there was one notable exception: when the experimenters presented the objects against new backgrounds (like moving the tiger from the forest to a grassy plain, or placing the jet against a cloud-filled sky), the Chinese students struggled with the task. Their accuracy dropped below 60 percent, so they were almost guessing whether they had seen the focal object earlier in the experiment.
The reason for their difficulty became clear when the researchers examined their eye movements as they memorized the images. The American students devoted most of their attention to the focal object, and spent considerably less time focusing on its background. While the Americans gazed at the objects through Aristotelian eyes, the Chinese students viewed the scenes through a Confucian lens, focusing as much on the background as on the object. The Chinese students were confused when the objects appeared in new backgrounds, because they had formed memories of the objects in context, while the Americans had paid very little attention to the backgrounds at all.
Seeing People Through a Cultural Lens
Cultural legacies have a similar influence on how we perceive people and social interactions. Just as Chinese people are more likely than Americans to focus on objects, rather than their backgrounds, so they also believe that people are overlapping entities who relate to the other people in their lives. Westerners (people from the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, for example) are more likely to believe that they are distinct from other people, so even when they become very close to friends or loved ones, they still see themselves as individuals. This philosophical belief, known as individualism, is very different from the East Asian (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, for example) belief in collectivism, which implies that everyone is interconnected, that our identities overlap, and our actions should benefit the group as a whole above any one individual. Although people from both cultural groups recognize that they’re at once individuals and members of a group, the individual component looms larger for Westerners, while the collective component carries relatively more weight for Easterners.
In one series of experiments, researchers asked American and Japanese students to interpret the emotions of a cartoon man who stood in front of a background filled with four other male and female cartoon characters. Sometimes all five shared the same emotional expression, but at other times the figure at the front seemed to have a different expression from those of the figures behind him, as in the case below.
When the students were asked to judge the central character’s emotions—whether he was happy, sad, or angry—72 percent of the Japanese students said they were unable to ignore the emotions of the people in the background, while only 28 percent of the American students had the same reaction. Of course, the Japanese students then rated the happy character as less happy, the sad character as less sad, and the angry character as less angry when the four characters in the background expressed different emotions. As in the study that featured tigers and fighter jets, the Japanese students spent plenty of time looking at the four faces in the background, whereas the Americans focused almost exclusively on the expression of the large face in the foreground.
Americans take the virtues of liberty and individual freedom for granted, but since East Asians pay so much attention to collective well-being, culture researchers have questioned whether they might emphasize the values of harmony and conformity over uniqueness and independence. One analysis measured the use of uniqueness and conformity in over three hundred newspaper and magazine ads in the United States and Korea. Some of the publications focused on business and social commentary (Money and the New York Times in the United States and Business Weekly and Deep Fountain in Korea), while others targeted women and youth. While almost every advertisement in Korea promoted the values of tradition, conformity, and following trends, nearly every advertisement in the United States emphasized choice, freedom, and uniqueness. One Korean ad claimed, “Seven out of ten people are using this product,” a statement that might repel U.S. consumers. In contrast, an ad in the United States noted, “The Internet isn’t for everybody. But then again, you are not everybody,” a sentiment that might offend the collectivist sentiments of Korean consumers.
These ads also reflect how collectivists and individualists actually behave. One of the most famous research programs in the history of social psychology was Solomon Asch’s investigation of human conformity in the United States during the 1950s. Asch had grown up in Poland during the early 1900s before moving to Brooklyn, New York, with his parents in 1920. As a boy sitting at his parents’ table on Passover, Asch asked why a glass that his father had filled with wine sat untouched in front of an empty seat. His father replied that the glass was reserved for the prophet Elijah, and at that moment young Solomon was convinced that the level of wine in the glass declined slightly. Asch’s early fascination with suggestibility and influence became a lifelong interest in conformity and propaganda, particularly in the wake of the horrors of World War II. So he designed a study to test the limits of human conformity. In his standard experiment, seven people sat in a room and completed a simple task: to determine which line on the right matched the length of the line on the left.
The task is trivial, because the answer is very clearly Line C, but there was a twist in the experiment’s design. The last person to respond aloud was a naive participant who had no idea what the experiment was designed to test. He also had no idea that the other six participants were stooges who had been instructed by the experimenter to claim, unanimously, that the correct answer was Line B. So as the experiment progressed they casually called out, “Line B,” while the e
xperimenter recorded their responses. The naive participant became increasingly agitated, wondering at first whether he had misunderstood the instructions and then whether the other people in the room were playing a prank. But none of them wavered, and then it was his turn to respond. Across hundreds of trials, Asch found that roughly 30 percent of all American participants conformed, responding with the same manifestly incorrect “Line B” response that the others in the room delivered, one after another. This result is powerful because it shows that although Americans generally place a premium on the individualistic values of uniqueness and self-reliance, they still succumb to the pressures of social influence.
As with the Müller-Lyer illusion, it took researchers some time to investigate the effect in other cultures, but eventually they administered Asch’s experiment across the globe. The results were similar in other individualistic countries, from the U.K. to Holland, but they were dramatically stronger in collectivistic countries. Japanese participants conformed up to 50 percent of the time, Ghanaians 47 percent of the time, and Fijians 58 percent of the time. Conformity—a route to social harmony—occurs sometimes in the individualistic United States, but it’s far more likely to occur within cultures that value collectivistic ideals.
These striking differences between individualists and collectivists are reflected in their distinct ancient philosophical styles, but why did ancient Greeks pursue individualistic philosophies while Confucians pursued collectivistic philosophies? Researchers still argue about the ultimate origins of individualism and collectivism, but one fascinating (and contentious) recent theory suggests that these tendencies might reflect the concentration of disease-causing microbes. Collectivistic societies are likely to thrive in pathogen-rich areas of the world, because collectivists tend to fear outsiders more than individualists, and they’re less likely to take the sorts of risks that might encourage disease. This xenophobic attitude toward outsiders may have benefited collectivistic societies, because it shielded them from alien diseases that their bodies weren’t equipped to fight. In contrast, individualists were more likely to stray from the group and to interact with outsiders, encouraging new diseases to ravage their own groups when they returned from adventures beyond the fold. Over time, then, collectivistic cultures thrived in pathogen-rich areas of the world, while their individualistic counterparts fell to the ravages of disease. Meanwhile, individualistic cultures thrived in areas with fewer dangerous pathogens. They tended to be more industrious, adventurous, and creative, so they dominated their collectivistic counterparts as long as they weren’t threatened by communicable diseases.
A study in 2008 showed just this pattern when a team of American and Canadian psychologists compared microbe levels in historically individualistic and collectivistic areas of the world. The researchers divided the world into almost a hundred regions, and consulted two expert culture researchers to assess the level of individualism and collectivism in each area. The experts rated each region on a scale of 1 (very collectivistic) to 10 (very individualistic). Individualistic regions included the United States (which scored 9.55), Britain (8.95), and Switzerland (7.90), whereas China (2.00), Nigeria (3.00), and Portugal (3.80) were relatively collectivistic. Lying between the extremes were regions including Romania (5.00), Spain (5.55), and South Africa (5.75). The relationship between the two critical measures was very strong, as the regions with historically higher pathogen levels tended to be far more collectivistic, historically, than the areas with lower pathogen levels. The researchers concluded that the pressures of the environment may have shaped specific longer-term cultural patterns in each region of the world.
While researchers still debate the origins of collectivism and individualism, culture continues to shape how people think about more than just the physical and social worlds. Cultural experience also shapes how we construe abstract concepts, like the relationships between numbers, the best way to paint a portrait, and whether to fight or flee in response to personal insults. We become so comfortable with our own cultural understanding of these abstract concepts that we come to assume that our views are privileged or inevitable. But even hard-edged concepts like mathematics are open to cultural reinterpretation. In the late 1980s, when one researcher came upon a group of poor Brazilian children who sold candy on the streets, he learned the Western approach to teaching addition and subtraction isn’t the only option.
Seeing Mathematics, Art, and Honor Through a Cultural Lens
Wealthy ten-year-olds in the West learn how to add and subtract in school, while poor ten-year-olds in many parts of the world are forced to teach themselves the same concepts as a matter of survival. In Recife, a large urban area in northeastern Brazil, poor children sell candy and fruit on the street from a very young age. They wade into the deep waters of commerce without any schooling, and the submissive and uncertain among them are vulnerable to con artists and customers who try to pass a two-real bill for a five-real bill (the real is the Brazilian unit of currency). The children quickly learn to add and subtract, and to distinguish between bargaining and giving away their wares too quickly. In the 1980s, a number of researchers descended on Recife and discovered that these children had developed a sophisticated understanding of mathematical concepts that their privileged Western contemporaries acquired only after years of education. The researchers asked the child sellers to complete a number of mathematical tasks that they also presented to children of the same age at a local public school, and in a nearby rural area. In one task, they were asked to add seventeen bills that totaled 17,300 cruzeiros (the currency at the time; now replaced by the real). And in another they were asked to determine whether they could earn more revenue per bag by selling each bag of Pirulitos—Brazilian candies—for 200 cruzeiros, or seven bags for 1,000 cruzeiros.
The Recife schoolchildren and rural children who weren’t selling candy and fruit struggled to add the bills, answering only 30–50 percent of the questions correctly. But the sellers answered a whopping 82 percent of the questions correctly. Even their errors were smaller, usually falling no more than 200 cruzeiros from the correct answer, whereas the other children were significantly less accurate. The sellers were also far better at the revenue calculation task. Seventy-eight percent of them correctly noted that selling one bag of Pirulitos for 200 cruzeiros generated more revenue per bag than selling seven bags for 1,000 cruzeiros. The schoolchildren answered the question correctly only 50 percent of the time, and only 24 percent of the rural children who weren’t working as street vendors gave the correct response.
When the experimenters asked the street vendors how they had performed so impressively, they explained how they broke the larger numbers into smaller components. Instead of trying to add the seventeen bills one after another, for example, they split them into convenient groups—one 500-cruzeiro bill, two 200-cruzeiro bills, and one 100-cruzeiro bill summed to 1,000 cruzeiros, and those bills could be set aside while the remaining thirteen bills were summed. They similarly explained that if one bag of Pirulitos was worth 200 cruzeiros, they could sell two for 400, three for 600, four for 800, and five for 1,000 cruzeiros—a smaller number than they would have to give up in a trade of seven bags for 1,000 cruzeiros. Despite lacking a formal education in mathematics, these children had lived in a culture that forced them to acquire their own skills. While they quickly learned to add and calculate the profit in different trades, they were no better at reading numbers off the page or comparing the size of different numbers—tasks that weren’t important in the day-to-day requirements of street selling.
Mathematics and art seem to occupy opposite ends of the cultural spectrum—one universal and enduring, the other localized and always changing—but they also occupy considerable common ground. Leonardo da Vinci the artist was also Leonardo da Vinci the mathematician, and his Mona Lisa and Last Supper paintings appeal to the eye in part because they obey certain mathematical laws of visual harmony. Like a number of classical East Asian sculptures and b
uildings, their proportions conform to the so-called golden ratio, where their longer side is approximately 1.618 times longer than their shorter side. The golden ratio, first proposed by Pythagoras in the fifth century BC, is supposed to hold universal aesthetic appeal, and dozens of cultures adopted golden proportions when designing buildings and producing art.
Despite the universality of the golden ratio, cultures don’t always agree on what makes an artwork appealing. In a survey of almost five hundred famous Western and East Asian portraits, researchers found that the subject’s face covered an average of 15 percent of the canvas in Western artworks, and only 4 percent in East Asian artworks. In a similar analysis of Facebook profile pictures, 12 percent of a sample of Texan and Californian users displayed photos of their faces without any background, while fewer than 1 percent of a sample from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei chose similar close-ups that focused on their faces and excluded the background.
Average ratio of subject’s face to canvas size in Western (left) and East Asian (right) museum portraits.
These aesthetic ideals aren’t just cultural relics. When the same researchers asked American and East Asian students to draw a scene featuring a house, a tree, a river, a person, and a horizon, the American students created simpler drawings that emphasized the house and person, while the East Asian students focused more on the background and added 74 percent more contextual detail than the American students. When the same students later took photos of four models, the Americans filled the frame with the models’ faces. In contrast, the East Asian students emphasized the models’ bodies and the room’s background, occupying only a third as much of the canvas with their faces. A broad sample of people within each culture, from naive students to artistic luminaries, appeared to hold the same aesthetic preferences.