Sunday, June 22, 2008
Monkey, banana, panda. Which two would you pick out to put in a group?
Theoretically westerners are supposed to pick monkey and panda because they see the world in terms of categories while easterners pick monkey and banana because they see the world in terms of relationships. But there seems to be many westerners scratching their heads because they've picked monkey and banana.
Aud and I think that the test is unfair because monkeys are strongly associated with bananas (in media and books and whatnot) but not with pandas. So western minds may be compelled to pick monkey and banana despite their love for categorization, because they are conditioned to connect the two together.
By the way, we found this question when we were trying to find out why Westerners seem to love bananas (they've invented food such as banana split,
banana foster, banana cream pie, banana and peanut butter sandwiches... ). We didn't find the answer we want.