(or: they all look …) (or: … all look alike)
In the New Yorker‘s 7/20/26 issue, an Ivan Ehlers cartoon on this theme:
The cross-species effect: to a shark, every non-shark looks the same — looks, in particular, like the most salient non-shark, the shark’s major prey animal the seal; plus, everything is funnier in cartoon SharkWorld (just put a cocktail glass into a shark’s fins)
This is an analogue of the more familiar cross-race effect. From Wikipedia:
The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias, own-race bias or other-race effect) is the tendency to more easily recognize faces that belong to one’s own racial group, or racial groups that one has been in contact with. … The cross-race effect is thought to contribute to difficulties in cross-race identification, as well as implicit racial bias.
A number of theories as to why the cross-race effect exists have been conceived, including social cognition and perceptual expertise. However, no model has been able to fully account for the full body of evidence.
The facts are extraordinarily complex, involving (as they do) both individual psychology (including life experiences as well as perceptions and personal beliefs) and also sociocultural constructions (including group identities, norms. and shared values), plus their interactions.
Personal note. Yes, I failed to post anything more than the briefest of notes yesterday. No, I’m not sick; in fact, I am still on a high of good feeling. But I was unavailable for almost all of the day while the excellent Ned Deily installed a new iMac for me, in place of the still-functioning but gravely venerable previous one. The installation is still being polished, and today I will get a new printer installed as well, so there’s plenty of tsuris still to come. No actual disasters, but big piles of annoyance.
Yesterday also included many hours of labor by the Avant’s maintenance guys, assembling a 7-foot narrow table for my bedroom, using the pile of wooden pieces I had Amazon ship in from a east-coast supplier last week. It’s exactly what I wanted, fits the space perfectly, and looks good. And I no longer have a giant, immovably heavy box of wood taking up one side of my kitchen.
(In the midst of this, I did two loads of laundry. And a pile of grocery shopping for delivery. I have not been aimlessly dreamy.)
Eventually I will muster the courage to shop for a small couch for what is now the parlor, so visitors have something better than stiff wooden chairs to sit in. Meanwhile, I’m slowly restoring bits of my DVD collection (the old ones were in a form that couldn’t be moved), so I have daily reunions with old video friends.
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