Earlier this week I wrote a post asking Is the Sky Blue?, discussing the way that culture influences our perception of color. In the comments thread Will Robertson linked to a fascinating 8-minute BBC Horizon clip. The video features an expert explaining how language changes how children process color in the brain.
We also travel to Namibia to visit with the Himba tribe. They have different color categories than we do in the West, making them “color blind” to certain distinctions we easily parse out, but revealing ways in which we, too, can be color blind.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 15
Japaniard — August 5, 2012
Saying that westerners think water is blue isn't really an accurate statement. I don't know anybody that looks at a glass or teapot full of water and thinks "That is blue". Large bodies of water (whose observed color is influenced by the reflection from the sky above) don't seem to be something the Himba tribe interact with frequently, so it would be very shocking if they said the water we saw in the pot was blue (be it zoozu borou)
Will Robertson — August 6, 2012
Glad you liked the video! I think it is an amazing example of the effects of language on perception. =)
Pinkiebunnie — August 6, 2012
This was fascinating. I would like to see more things that, like this, show the effects of language and culture on perception.
PinkWithIndignation — August 6, 2012
I instantly picked out the first different green color. I wonder if it helps that I work with a lot of subtle color variations in crafts? Or maybe it's just that I am good at spotting details?
PinkWithIndignation — August 6, 2012
@PinkWithIndignation:disqus Forgot to add that they switched it from the first closeup of the circle to the other shots from left in the second row down from the top to right on the second row down from the top. I don't think I am wrong, but let me know if I am- even I can't believe I saw it so fast and was right!
SociologicalMe — August 7, 2012
This is so incredibly fascinating! I loved this video.
Vadim McNab — August 8, 2012
My, what a primitive people.
Must be fun to make documentaries about them.
Holmheltz — August 21, 2012
Brains, words, concepts, seeing and telling. No activities, no experience. Standard Cartesian cognitive story. It must be the language. What difference those colors make in their activities does not seem to be as interesting as their words. Whether they color stuff, whether they communicate while coloring stuff does not seem to matter.
Paul — December 20, 2018
So um this was a (probably consciously) misleading:
"So to sum the story up as I understand it: The experiment shown in the documentary was a dramatization; the genuine color experiments done with the Himba, some years before, used a different sort of stimuli and a different experimental method; the stimuli shown in the documentary were modeled on those used by Paul Kay and others in experiments on other groups; but in all of the relevant experiments, the dependent measure was reaction time (in finding a matching color or an oddball color), not success or failure.
"The BBC's presentation of the mocked-up experiment — purporting to show that the Himba are completely unable to distinguish blue and green shades that seem quite different to us, but can easily distinguish shades of green that seem identical to us — was apparently a journalistic fabrication, created by the documentary's editors after the fact, and was never asserted by the researchers themselves, much less demonstrated experimentally.
"This explains why the "experiment" was never published, and why the stimuli shown in the documentary don't make sense.
"As a result, the striking and impressive assertions made in the documentary must be completely discounted, and we learn yet again that the BBC deserves shockingly little credibility in reporting on science."
From http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237 (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970 is also worth a read)