{"id":49787,"date":"2012-12-28T13:02:42","date_gmt":"2012-12-28T18:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=49787"},"modified":"2012-12-27T16:40:27","modified_gmt":"2012-12-27T21:40:27","slug":"is-the-sky-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/28\/is-the-sky-blue\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Sky Blue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n

A recent episode of Radiolab<\/a> centered on questions about colors<\/a>. \u00a0It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither\u00a0The Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0nor\u00a0The Iliad<\/em> included any references to the color blue. \u00a0In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last. \u00a0Red is always first. \u00a0This is the case in every language ever studied.<\/p>\n

Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare. \u00a0The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue<\/a>. \u00a0Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes. \u00a0So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named.<\/p>\n

An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky. \u00a0The sky is blue, right?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, it turns out that seeing blue when we look up is dependent on already knowing that the sky is blue. \u00a0To illustrate, the hosts of Radiolab interviewed a linguist named\u00a0Guy Deutscher who did a little experiment on his daughter, Alma. \u00a0Deutscher taught her all the colors, including blue, in the typical way: pointing to objects and asking what color they were. \u00a0In the typical way, Alma mastered her colors quite easily.<\/p>\n

But Deutscher and his wife avoided ever telling Alma that the sky was blue. \u00a0Then, one day, he pointed to a clear sky and asked her, “What color is that?”<\/p>\n

Alma, at first, was puzzled. \u00a0To Alma, the sky was a void, not an object with properties like color. \u00a0It was nothing. There simply wasn’t a “that” there at all. \u00a0She had no answer. \u00a0The idea that the sky is a thing at all, then, is not immediately obvious.<\/p>\n

Deutscher kept asking on “sky blue” days\u00a0and one day she answered: the sky was white. \u00a0White was her answer for some time and she only later suggested that maybe it was blue. \u00a0Then blue and white took turns for a while, and she finally settled on blue.<\/p>\n

The story is a wonderful example of the role of culture in shaping perception. \u00a0Even things that seem objectively true may only seem so if we’ve been given a framework with which to see it; even the idea that a thing is a thing at all, in fact, is partly a cultural construction. \u00a0There are other examples of this phenomenon. \u00a0What we call “red onions” in the U.S., for another example, are seen as blue in parts of Germany<\/a>. \u00a0Likewise, optical illusions that consistently trick people in some cultures — such as the M\u00fcller-Lyer illusion<\/a> — don’t often trick people in others.<\/p>\n

So, next time you look into the sky, ask yourself what you might see if you didn’t see blue.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last week of December, we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. \u00a0It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither\u00a0The Odyssey\u00a0nor\u00a0The Iliad included any references to the color blue. \u00a0In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,373,23384,2123,253,675],"class_list":["post-49787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-color","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-environmentnature","tag-history","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49787"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58069,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49787\/revisions\/58069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}