The culture

The endowment effectEndowment effectDon’t take away what you have already given. If you must take it away, warn first and say what goes in its place.Open the law → says we charge more to give something up than we would pay to have it. It is cited as if it were furniture of the human mind.

ApicellaApicellaWent looking for the endowment effect among the Hadza, in Tanzania. In the most isolated groups the effect simply does not appear.One reference in this work:2014Evolutionary origins of the endowment effect: evidence from hunter-gatherersSee in the bibliography →, Azevedo, Christakis and Fowler (2014) went looking for it among the Hadza, hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. In the most isolated groups the effect does not appear: they trade about half the time, which is exactly the rate of people not affected by anything. In the groups that live alongside tourists, it appears.

MadduxMadduxCompared Westerners and East Asians on the endowment effect and found the effect stronger in the former.One reference in this work:2010For whom is parting with possessions more painfulSee in the bibliography → et al. (2010) had already found the effect stronger in Westerners than in East Asians. And they went further: they experimentally manipulated how much a person thought of themselves as an individual or as part of a group, and the size of the effect moved with it.

So it is not furniture of the mind. It is an effect that tracks exposure to markets. A product leaning on it — a trial period, “your cart is waiting for you”, “you will lose your data” — is betting that the user was raised in a certain kind of economy.

The fundamental attribution errorFundamental attribution errorWhen someone makes a mistake, investigate the flow before blaming the person.Open the law → is the tendency to explain other people’s behaviour by their character and ignore the situation. It is the basis of “the user is stupid” and of all the work of convincing the team otherwise.

ChoiChoiGathered, with Nisbett and Norenzayan, the evidence that collectivist cultures attribute less cause to the person and more to the situation.One reference in this work:1999Causal attribution across cultures: variation and universalitySee in the bibliography →, Nisbett and Norenzayan (1999) gathered the evidence that collectivist cultures make this error less, above all when the situational cause is visible. Individualist cultures look at the person; others look at the field around them.

A caveat that has to come along: with the classic procedure, without choice, the bias shows up strongly in East Asia too. Part of the difference may be method rather than culture. It is a real difference of uncertain size, which is neither a myth nor a constant.

Russian forces a distinction between goluboy, light blue, and siniy, dark blue. They are different colours, the way green and blue are different for us. English and Portuguese do not do that.

WinawerWinawerCompared Russian and English speakers telling blues apart. The Russians were faster, and the advantage vanished under a concurrent verbal task.One reference in this work:2007Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discriminationSee in the bibliography → et al. (2007) had speakers of both languages say, as fast as possible, which of two blues matched a third. The Russians were faster when the two blues fell into different categories in their language. And the design of the study closes the argument. The advantage disappeared when they simultaneously performed a verbal task, and did not disappear with a spatial one. It was language working there, not the eye.

This touches the law of similarityLaw of similarityThe same visual treatment means the same function, even if the elements are far from each other.Open the law → and legibilityLaw of legibilityContrast, size and leading come before the choice of typeface.Open the law → directly. The point at which two colours “are the same” is negotiated with the vocabulary of whoever is looking.

A warning, because this is neuromyth country. The story of the Eskimos with dozens of words for snow is a famous popularisation — Geoffrey PullumGeoffrey K. PullumCalled the story of the dozens of words for snow “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, and was right about the exaggeration.One reference in this work:1989The great Eskimo vocabulary hoaxSee on Wikipedia ↗See in the bibliography → (1989) called it “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”. But RegierRegierWent after the principle beneath the Eskimo myth and found better grounding: languages of warm climates tend to merge snow and ice into one word.One reference in this work:2016Languages support efficient communication about the environment: words for snow revisitedSee in the bibliography →, Carstensen and Kemp (2016) went after the principle underneath and found better ground: languages that use the same word for snow and ice tend to be spoken in warm climates, and the link runs through the need to talk about the thing. Language does not invent perception. It creates a category where one is needed.

White is mourning across much of the East and weddings in the West. The same screen changes meaning crossing a border, without changing a pixel.

The aesthetic-usability effectAesthetic–usability effectDo not refine the aesthetics before validating the concept, the finish hides the defect.Open the law → says beautiful seems to work better. It does not say what beautiful is, and we tend to fill that gap with our own taste without noticing we filled it.

I will close with the one that bothers me most. Social proofSocial proofA real social number helps. An invented one destroys trust in the rest of the screen.Open the law → is one of the three laws here where I found a study that measured the effect and the mechanism in the brain in the same task, and that study was run in the Netherlands. And “what other people are doing” depends entirely on who the other people are, which is the most cultural thing there is. One of the best-measured laws in the catalogue is also one of the most tied to the place where it was measured.