Socio-Cultural Influences on Perception

Several psychologists have studied the processes of perception as they occur across different socio-cultural settings. The questions such studies try to answer include: does the perceptual organisation of people living in different cultural settings take place in a uniform manner? Are the underlying perceptual processes universal, or do they vary across different cultural settings? Because people living in different parts of the world visibly look different from one another, many psychologists hold the view that their characteristic ways of perceiving the world must also differ in certain respects. Some important studies relating to the perception of illusion figures and other pictorial material help address this question.

Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits carried out the most extensive study of illusion susceptibility of this kind, comparing samples drawn from remote African villages with samples drawn from Western urban settings. It was found that African participants showed greater susceptibility to the vertical-horizontal illusion, while Western participants showed greater susceptibility to the Muller-Lyer illusion, and similar findings have since been reported in other studies as well. Living amid dense forests, the African participants were regularly exposed to verticality (in the form of tall trees, for example) and developed a tendency to overestimate it; Westerners, who lived in an environment characterised by right angles, developed a tendency instead to underestimate the length of lines bounded by enclosure (such as an arrowhead shape). This conclusion has been confirmed in several further studies, and it suggests that the specific habits involved in perception are learnt somewhat differently across different cultural settings. …