Understanding the English language cognitive bias through Arrival’s Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
A new study reveals that cognitive research is impaired by an English language bias due to the language’s dominance by English-speaking researchers and participants.
The study, featured in Cell, notes that globally, one in six people speaks some variety of English with some proficiency, which makes it the most widely used language to have existed in the history of our species. Its dominance extends well beyond raw numbers of speakers.
However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the study of language itself. The following table demonstrates how English as a language is restrictive and inexpressive on a multiplicity of fronts while studying cognitive science:
To understand how something as rudimentary as the language we speak shapes the socio-political and economic changes that have occurred over the course of history, shaping human existence, here’s a bit of a crash course in linguistic theory through cinema.
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. Simply put, the language which we speak and think in shapes the way we perceive the world around us.
The concept of Linguistic relativity has been popularised in Denis Villenueve’s Academy Award winning sci-fi drama, Arrival.
Adapted from Ted Chiang’s Nebula Award winning novella, "Story of Your Life", it follows linguist Dr. Louise Banks the day her daughter is conceived. Addressed to her daughter, the story alternates between recounting the past: the coming of extraterrestrial life to Earth and the deciphering of their language; and remembering the future: what will happen to her preborn daughter as she grows up, and the daughter's untimely death.
Working to decipher the strange circular language the Heptapod aliens, communicate in, Amy Adams’s Dr Banks begins to have visions of the past and future as her perception of time shifts from linear to circular.
Having exposed herself to prolonged periods of time of studying the Heptapod language, Banks realizes learning it alters humans' linear perception of time, allowing them to experience "memories" of future events. Banks' visions of her daughter, Hannah, are revealed actually to be premonitions; her daughter will not be born until some time in the future.
Arrival is a beautiful illustration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis through pop culture, one that gives us a better understanding of just how influential language can be when determining the ways in which we perceive the world around us.
According to the research compiled by Harvard University, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the National Center for Scientific Research, and Purdue University, the inherent anglocentric bias while studying cognitive sciences creates limitations that impact a vast array of subfields that go well beyond language including perception, memory, reasoning, and social cognition.
In order to overcome this bias, researchers suggest a series of steps that start with using linguistic open databases, engaging speakers of languages other than English via crowd sourcing, conducting cross cultural field studies, and increasing collaboration between anglocentric institutions and those outside the English realm.