Understanding Cultural Differences: the Michigan Fish Test (2013)
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
michael-roberto.blogspot.comOtherstory
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Cultural DifferencesPsychologyPerception
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Cultural Differences
Psychology
Perception
The 'Michigan Fish Test' reveals cultural differences in perception, with Westerners focusing on focal objects and East Asians considering the broader context, sparking discussion on its implications and limitations.
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Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person, is key to resolving differences between you. And disrupting that ability is a way to destroy a country from within.
Adversaries such as China, Iran, Russia, and others know they cannot physically destroy the US or the collective West. Yet they can, if done right, cause self destruction. They can spread lies, misrepresent, spew distrust, and entice youth's natural dissatisfaction to grow and flourish.
Destroy the US from within, and they succeed without a shot fired.
It matters not what actor is currently on the stage. Whether left or right, this president or next or prior, the hostility exists. And it exists in large part, thanks to our enemies seeking our doom.
When you hate your political opponent without knowing them? When you blindly follow political dogma without questioning? When you take a stance because a party does?
You become a useful idiot.
And sadly?
In this day and age, we all are idiots.
Seek that part of the picture you are missing. Work to get your opponent to do the same.
You may still disagree, but even the tinest expansion of view is a victory for you both. Even the briefest glimse of otherness, a win.
> Understanding that your political opponent is not an enemy, or a bad person
J.D. Vance, Donad Trump and Putin are bad people. They are all my political opponents.
What a difficult challenge to determine which one to support.
ah yes, understanding the people who want to kill people like me is a great win.
Don't corollaries to your comments also apply at a higher level globally, or is there something special about considering countries as a grouping vs political parties?
Surely they're all just games we play in our minds and people kind of arbitrarily just agree that countries most definitely exist and this is my in-group, whereas others are enemies.
But this view is also a win for "them". A society that cannot look to itself, see its failings and divisions and address them and move past them is doomed to stagnation and failure.
The thing about divide and conqour strategies, is they don't create the divisions out of nothing. They exploit what is already there. Suppressing the divisions without resolving them is like surpressing an emotion. Eventually the pressure builds until there is an explosion. It is as much a losing strategy as letting differences spiral into animosisty and hatred.
Sucessful strategies (such as stoking division) usually don't have an easy answer of what you can just do to defeat the strategy. If they did, people wouldn't have been using such strategies for thousands of years; People use them because they are hard to counter.
Seriously, what information are you hoping to get out of this and why do you think it has any relavence to the job?
It's a pity the researchers didn't explain what that says about our culture, or which Disney princess we are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)
It's like bokeh, the world in itself has a base meaning, which can point to a specific thing when used in the right context, like in photography.
The main difference regards the emphasis/value placed on it. In Japanese culture the space between:
> often (holds) as much importance as the rest of an artwork
This is a great read, with examples (namely gardens and theaters):
https://web.archive.org/web/20241127041031/https://deeperjap...
That's not universal though. Some languages like Japanese, German, & Inuit are synthetic, so a "word" may be more like a compound phrase in an analytic language. So "having a word for it" can be identical to "being able to describe it". In this case it's a particularly short word, so your point is otherwise valid. I'd say that it's probably more "low Kolmogorov complexity vs high Kolmogorov complexity" of the word or phrase that matters. Concepts expressable with lower-complexity words or phrases are likely more common & thus more culturally important than those requiring high-complexity words or phrases.
If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.
I'd honestly be shocked if this was repeatable. A brief search didn't turn up any attempts.
It makes sense to me that there would be differences in how people with various cultural backgrounds interpret art, since we largely know that the way people experience and think about color is different, though
For all of the p-hacking and file drawer effects that modern research (noting this is an older piece) tries to avoid, the incentives for popular scientific media including blog posts all run in the other direction. Even if limited to just good, replicable studies in journals, anything we hear about via popularization is likely to be attached to a stronger-than-real effect size.
Turns out I was right. Not sure what these pop-psychologists would say about it though.
I looked at all the elements and was trying to understand the relationships and why the frog was the way it is and why the foreground fish had more colour.
2 reasons for that, I think. One, that I was aware it was a "test", and two, I'm an analyst.
In any case, this kind of convenient and interesting finding smells like replication crisis fodder to me.