Module 2: Perception and Consciousness

Question 1

How does culture influences what we perceive?

Answer 1

It influences what we perceive because it informs our perceptual set.

Question 2

What is the perceptual set?

Answer 2

• Perceptual expectations based on experience
• Makes particular interpretations more likely to occur
• Increases speed and efficiency
• Culture-specific

Question 3

How does culture effect our personal experience?

Answer 3

It effects our experience because it brings to attention certain stimuli such as the stimuli linked to the gratification of need.

Question 4

What are example of the the gratification of need for rich children? for poor?

Answer 4

• Children from rich families see coins as smaller than they actually are.
• Children from poor families overestimate the size of coins.

Question 5

What are the cultural variations in visual scanning patterns?

Answer 5

• People who read from left to right – left-right scanning pattern
• People who read from right to left (Jews & Arabs) – right-left scanning pattern
• People who read from top to bottom (Japanese) – top-bottom scanning pattern

Question 6

How does culture effect the perception of depth?

Answer 6

• Organization of sensation in 3 dimensions even though image on retina is 2 dimensional
• People without formal schooling do not perceive 2-dimensional depiction as 3-dimensional image

Question 7

Which people are unable to convert 3-d perceptions into 2-d sketches?

Answer 7

• Individuals with no formal schooling
• Young children
• Early artists a few thousand years ago

Question 8

What are the reasons that affect the differences in our perception of colour?

Answer 8

1) Racial difference
2) Gender
3) Language – language debate on the naming of colours

Question 9

How does race effect our perception of colour?

Answer 9

• Physical differences in colour perception between racial groups
• Retinal pigmentation – denser retinal pigmentation, more difficulty detecting contours especially blue

Question 10

How does gender effect our perception of colour?

Answer 10

• There are a lot more colour-blind men than women – the gene that causes colour blindness is carried on the X chromosome, making the handicap far more common among men (who have just one X chromosome) than among women (who have two, so must inherit the gene from both parents).
• While all men only see the world in three standard colors (red, blue, and green), about 1/3 of women see the world in FOUR basic colors – these “tetrachromatic” women have an extra shade of green or an extra shade of red. Some even have all five colors

Question 11

How does language effect our perception of colour?

Answer 11

• Some languages lack certain words for particular colours

Question 12

What are the problems with blue and green?

Answer 12

• Himba: Researchers showed some of the Himba tribe a circle with 11 green squares & one blue - they could not pick out which one was different from the others, or took much longer to make sense of it
• Chinese: “qing” = blue AND green
• Japanese:
  “Midoru” (“to be in leaf, to flourish” in reference to trees)
  “Guriin” (derived from the English word “green”)
  The green traffic light is called using the same word for blue, “aoi”, because green is considered a shade of “aoi”
• Other languages:
  Many languages use the same word for “blue” and “green”
  (Linguists use the word “grue” to refer to this phenomenon)
  E.g. Navajo, Tzeltal, and Tarahumara
  E.g. In Vietnamese - the color word “xanh” can be used to describe either the sky or the leaves of trees
  E.g. In Thai, the word “สีเขียว” means “green” but can also be used to describe the sky

Question 13

Does language determine thought?

Answer 13

• If yes – linguistic determinism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis )
• If no – linguistic universalism, i.e. linguistic patterns occur systematically across natural languages or there exist generalizations across languages
  e. g. a list of basic vocabulary in each language

Question 14

Linguistic relativism/determinism in color naming

Answer 14

Variability of colour terms cross-linguistically points to more culture-specific phenomena

Question 15

Linguistic universalism in color naming

Answer 15

Biology is one & the same – so development of colour terminology has absolute universal constraints

Question 16

What is the verdict on colour naming?

Answer 16

• “Moderate” Universalism

- In colour perception, relativism appears to overlay a universalist foundation

Question 17

What are the five primary sense of taste?

Answer 17

Sweet
Sour
Bitter
Salty
Umami

Question 18

How does culture and biology determine our ability to name and identify smells?

Answer 18

• Odour-identification ability of the Jahai people (a rain-forest foragers on the Malay Peninsula).
  
  • They are about as good at naming what they smell as what they see.
  • They also performed much better than the American subjects when they were given the same “sniff and tell” odour identification test.
  • Speakers of Jahai (and other related languages) have precise words for different smells that are equivalent to the range of words – red, green, brown – that English has for colours.
    
    • They have abstract terms – between 12 to 15 of them – for the smell of objects that they are exposed to in their everyday lives, such as bat droppings and the leaf of ginger root.
    • When the Jahai people are talking to each other about smells, they can get an immediate, accurate idea of what their friends are describing, unlike us when we are saying things like “it is a lovely sweet-tasting scent that smells like mango.”
  • These are “basic” aroma terms in the same sense that we talk about “basic” colours: one-word descriptors, shared by everyone in the group, that do not refer to the source, and are used for a variety of objects.
    
    • Young children know them.
    • They turn up all the time – they are basic vocabulary.
    • They are not used for taste or the palatability of food – they are only used to describe smell.
    • So maybe, after all, “primary odours” do exist, except that scientists had been looking at the wrong place for them.

Question 19

How do young cantonese speakers have a smaller olfactory vocabulary than older ones?

Answer 19

Younger Cantonese speakers have fewer words for flavours and smells than older ones – this growing poverty in the linguistic ability to describe tastes and smells among the young Cantonese speakers has been attributed to rapid socioeconomic development and Western-style schooling.

Question 20

How do the cultural norms and expectations affect our perception of pain?

Answer 20

• Labour pain is less in societies where childbirth not considered a defiling event & where little help is offered
• Harsh living & working conditions – people more stoical & less susceptible to pain
• Without adequate access to health care – higher threshold

Question 21

How does our perception of beauty affect our aesthetic experience of it?

Answer 21

• Feeling of pleasure
• Cortical arousal
• Curiosity & stimulus seeking
• Novelty, ambiguity, incongruity, & complexity

Question 22

What are the similarities across culture in aesthetic appreciation?

Answer 22

• Similarities in evaluation of works of art

- Many national patterns become international (e.g. Japanese concept of “kawaii”)

Question 23

How do the emotions we link to music affect our perception of it?

Answer 23

• “Emotions” in Western music not necessarily shared by non-Western listeners
  
  • The Mbenzele Pygmies living in near isolation in the rain forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo from Western culture
  • Researchers (from Montreal! McGill University and Université de Montréal) played them excerpts of Western songs, e.g. “Cantina” (positive feelings in Westerners), “Psycho” theme (fear), and Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” (sadness)
    
    • The emotional cues in songs which Westerners pick up on did not mean the same to the Pygmies.
  • When asked to rate their own culture’s music for its emotional quality, the Pygmies said all their songs made them feel good – even a song composed for a funeral
    
    • All of their music is generally upbeat & playful – the culture does not have sad songs
    • In the Pygmy culture, sad feelings aren’t accepted – they try to get rid of negative emotions by singing happy music whose role is to evacuate bad feelings

Question 24

How does the internationalization of originally national style music affect the perception of it?

Answer 24

Contemporary mass media, global trade, & frequent interpersonal contacts – mixing of musical styles

Question 25

How do monophasic cultures perceive dreams?

Answer 25

• Value cognitive experiences during normal waking phase
• Do not incorporate dreams into process of social perception & cognition
• Dreams are regarded as of dreamer’s concerns, fears, & desires
• Dream interpretation - latent content
• Materialistic worldview

Question 26

How do polyphasic cultures perceive dreams?

Answer 26

• Treat dreams as part of reality
• Spiritual or traditional view
• Dream interpretation - manifest content

Question 27

What is the cultural variation in perception of time?

Answer 27

There is structured time orientation vs. unstructured time orientation

Question 28

How do European and North American people perceive time?

Answer 28

• Punctuality: precise measures of time

- Time as commodity

Question 29

How do the Nuer people of South Sudan perceive time?

Answer 29

• Do not have any word that corresponds to the abstract notion of “time” – days are neither named nor numbered
• The Nuers do not speak of time as an entity unto itself; instead, time is associated with activity
• The Nuers divide the year into wet & dry months; the seasons are recognized by changes in rainfall and wind patterns
• Ask a Nuer in May what time of the year it is, and he’ll say that “the old people are turning to the villages.” Ask again in January and you’ll be told that “everyone is returning to the dry-season camps.”
• The Nuers do not know their age, but they would be able to tell you which “age set” they belong to (youth, adolescent, etc. through old age)

Question 30

How do the Luo people of western Kenya perceive time?

Answer 30

• Time stands still unless certain events take place in their prescribed order
• E.g. The first wife must be the first one to plant her crops, to prepare her farm, before all the other women; she must be the first one to weed, the first to eat
• E.g. The first-born son must be the one to marry first, whether he likes it or not
• Failure to observe these rules could upset the natural order

Question 31

How do the Aymara people of Northern Chile perceive time?

Answer 31

Point forward when they talk about the past, and gesture toward the back when discussing the future
The Aymara word for “front” (nayra which means “eye” & “front”) is also used to refer to the past; the basic word for “back” (qhipa which means “behind”) is used to refer to the future
- Explanation: the Aymara make a distinction between statements that
- They have a personal knowledge of - events that they witnessed first-hand & known with certainty, i.e. the past - association with forward direction
- They only know second-hand – uncertain, i.e. the future – association with behind and unseen

Question 32

How does Japan perceive time?

Answer 32

• Japan has not only embraced CCT but would go on to become one of the most hurried nation on earth – while other countries were forcibly Westernized, Japan chose Westernization
• Today in Japan, a train is counted as “late” if it reaches its destination more than 1 minute behind schedule – the equivalent measure in England is 10 min; in France, 14 min; in Italy, 15 min; anywhere else in the world, a train running 90 min late would perhaps be considered on time

Question 33

What is pace of life?

Answer 33

• Levine: careful not to pass judgement on slow-paced cultures; “(w)hen we attribute a Brazilian’s tardiness to irresponsibility, or a Moroccan’s shifting of attention to their lack of focus, we are being both careless and ethnocentrically narrow-minded”
• Stereotypes of life being slower in warmer nations – all of the slowest countries in Levine’s 31 country survey have tropical climates
  In the U.S., many minority groups distinguish their own relaxed pace from that of the more hurried Anglo-American majority – Native Americans like to speak of living on “Indian time”, Mexican-Americans differentiate between hora inglesa (the actual time on the clock) and hora Mexicana (which treats the time on the clock considerably more casually)
• In the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, the pace of life is the most relaxed to be found on the planet:
  
  • The Kapauku people (western highlands of New Guinea) do not believe in working two consecutive days
  • The !Kung bushmen of southern Africa usually work about two and a half days per week, usually for 6 hours a day

Question 34

What is the new trend in the West in terms of time?

Answer 34

• Emergence of “slow movements” across Europe & North America
  
  • Slow food, slow cities, slow sex
• Introduction of cellphones
  
  • Makes time “squishier than ever” - we are now more “connected” than ever, and this, in turn, is radically changing the way we manage our time
  • As rushed as our culture may be, it contains pockets of “soft time” – especially when friends plan their evening & weekend activities
  • Many of us live in a bubble in which expectations of where and when to meet shift constantly b/c people expect others to be constantly reachable – 8:30 is still 8 o’clock as long as your voice arrives on time – or even a few minutes after – to advise that you will not be wherever you are supposed to be at the appointed hour
• The United States may have become more like Brazil where time has been spongy for generations; in Brazil, on the other hand, people who used to just arrive late now complain that they have to call & explain

Question 35

How do short-term orientation cultures affect one’s perception of time?

Answer 35

• Think & act more in the present

- Ghana, Nigeria, United States, Canada