True Story 10.02
Simple bar graphs prove to be anything but “intuitive”
The setting for this story
At a language school in Poland, adults with only a few years of formal education were studying German as a foreign language. Karl-Hubert, their teacher and a native speaker of German, gave these students an assignment that required them to use German to describe the meanings of a few simple bar graphs.
A story of misaligned minds2
Twenty percent of the students declined to respond, saying they had no familiarity with bar graphs. Another twenty percent gave up before completing the assignment. Less than half could even partially explain the graphs, and only a quarter of them did so accurately.
Karl-Hubert was astonished. He asked them to talk about the assignment. One frustrated student said, “Even in Polish I could not describe these graphs!” and another remarked, “I don’t even know where to begin with interpreting these diagrams; they’re just not clear.”
Karl-Hubert’s question
What in the world makes it so hard for these adults to get the meanings of a few simple bar graphs?
Critique of story 10.02
Responding to Karl-Hubert’s question gives us analytic Americans an opportunity to reflect on our upbringing and try to imagine ourselves growing up in non-analytic – holistic – surroundings.
Human beings like us raised in the WEIRD3 societies of our planet are immersed from infancy in surroundings in which analytic reasoning is a feature of everyday talk, schools directly and indirectly teach students to think analytically, and modern products of that thinking are literally everywhere: dishwashers, life-lengthening medical advances, and the James Webb Space Telescope, to name just three. Therefore, most youth who complete at least some high school have basic familiarity with bar graphs, one of the ubiquitous features of analytic thinking.
Thus, to people like us, it seems that humans are – or should be – readily able to use basic bar graphs. People I know might put it this way: “Simple bar graphs are intuitively obvious.”
No, they’re not. If you and I had been raised on a working farm deep in a rural area and had attended school for only one or two years, our thought patterns as adults would be largely holistic (or relational). And it’s likely that we would find bar graphs largely or entirely opaque.
The skills associated with bar graphs are learned. One needs to encounter them while growing up and, ideally, to be intentionally taught their meaning and use. I’m going to guess that, of all human beings alive today, a sizeable percentage, possibly a majority, never encountered bar graphs while growing up.
During the decade or two prior to 2005 (when my source for this story was published), most people wouldn’t have hesitated to classify Poland as a modern Western nation. Yet like every presumably modern nation (possibly excluding small city-states such as Singapore), Poland had sparsely inhabited rural areas of working farms and inadequate schools. Bar graphs in such surroundings would have been scarce indeed.
Realistically, Karl-Hubert should forget bar graphs and proceed to the next topic in the syllabus of the German course he’s teaching.
For thought
Try to think of something else you know how to do or to interpret that seems “intuitive” to you. But when you think about it, you realize that you’re so familiar with it because, at an early age, you began encountering it and then were taught it at home, in school, or in some other setting.
When I thought about this, I came up with map-reading, which I learned well as a Boy Scout.
Related stories
Story 10.07 is about people who had no problem finding their way around but couldn’t fathom a map of their own familiar surroundings.
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Endnotes:
2 Kiefer, 336–58. Accessed in Ott, 248.
3 WEIRD is explained in this book’s Introduction.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.