“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
In my last blog, we learned that we hear what we want to hear.
When images are symbols, how do we know what we see is what a person of another culture sees?
In recent months, I attended a lecture by Joe Lurie, author of Perception and Deception: A Mind Opening Journey Across Cultures, who introduced many thought provoking images. These images though common and harmless to our culture, can carry different interpretations via a cross cultural perspective. The opportunity to reexamine images is the first step in cross cultural understanding. The point is not necessarily to adopt each other’s politics, but to open that possibility of seeing another message behind the same image. Instead of seeing each other as direct opposites, a direct 180 degrees conflict, if we see each other just 10 degrees off, we can avoid a collision.
He gives plenty of examples for Anais Nin’s quote “We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”
Here’s a comic that he used to demonstrate his point:
Comic that Joe Lurie shared at his presentation.
