Annenberg School for Communication: Why Independent Cultures Think Alike When It Comes to Categories – It’s Not in the Brain Damon Centola

When it comes to organizing unfamiliar objects, the dominant hypothesis is that people are born with categories already in their brains. However, a recent study from the Network Dynamics Group at the Annenberg School for Communication discovered otherwise. In the experiment, people were asked to categorize unfamiliar shapes. Individuals and small groups created many different unique categorization systems while large groups created systems that were nearly identical to one another. “If people are all born seeing the world the same way, we would not observe so many differences in how individuals organize things,” says senior author Damon Centola, Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Read more here at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.