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Exploring Mind, Culture & Visual Illusion Controversies with Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone (Patreon)

Published:
2025-07-01 11:00:14
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

In this academic-themed interview episode of Decoding the Gurus, Matt and Chris sit down to chat with the cross-disciplinary academics Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone about their recent paper 'Is Visual Perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer Illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis.'

In a conversation that serves as a welcome tonic to the endless lamentations of the gurus about academic group-think and closed-minded silos, Dorsa and Chaz discuss the value of interdisciplinary work and engage with the debates around universal vs. culturally specific psychology and the strength of evidence that visual perception varies between across cultures. Prepare for a mind-blowing academic discussion, which warns of the dangers of being STUPID (Studying Topics Uninformed by Prior Investigations in the Discipline!) and finally uncovers just how much Chaz enjoys popping balloons.

A fun one that might even leave you a little bit more optimistic than usual!

Links

Amir, D., & Firestone, C. (2025). Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the cultural byproduct hypothesis. Psychological Review.

Dorsa's Homepage and Mind and Culture Lab.

Chaz's Perception & Mind Lab Homepage and his BJJ victory video.

Decoding Academia 33: The Great Müller-Lyer Debate from Fish Tanks to Eye Operations

Mickey Inzlicht's Substack on the Paper and the Debates around it.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

Lucca, K., Yuen, F., Wang, Y., Alessandroni, N., Allison, O., Alvarez, M., ... & Hamlin, J. K. (2025). Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study. Developmental Science, 28(1), e13581.

Comments

Colin

That was great! thanks. It's particularly interesting that "The Illusion Arises in Multiple Modalities". They report Suzuki and Arashida's results that the muller-lyer was more similar in magnitude between vision and touch than various other optic illusions; but those other illusions did all still work haptically. This is interesting because it suggests our brains might structure the world in a tacitly visual way whether or not we are actually seeing things. Which is a straightforward hypothesis since primate brains are so heavily specialised for vision. It would be interesting to see if one could somehow show this is not true in e.g. mice which have a much less elaborate visual system, but do have a sophisticated awareness of space and items within it.

Ymirsdreams

I've had job interviews and actually ended up employed: human perception is deeply flawed.

Daniel Reed Miller

Fascinating stuff. If you really want mind blown, go to the Wikipedia entry for Müller-Lyer illusion and look at the dynamic variants of the illusion, especially the one that looks like an oscillating sine wave. Pretty mind boggling. And makes me wonder too (considering also the Braille version) if there’s an auditory version.

Paul Bowman

This was great. I particularly relate to the problems of interdisciplinary topics. (re cognitive science, the Sloan hexagon was new to me, so that was a find). My own research area (outside of databases and math, re day job) is ideology studies, which pretty quickly runs up against the disciplinary boundaries between sociology and (social) psychology on the one hand and both of those as regards anthropology. I think things have progressed a deal since Michael Billig (coming from social psychology under the cognitive paradigm - he was Tajfel's graduate student during the work on the original minimal group experiments) lamented in the late 70s/early 80s that social psychology would not advance until it was able to engage seriously with ideology - and that wouldn't happen until it allowed for historically-specific cultural factors as well as cognitive ones (rather than bracketing out the former). To study ideology you really need both the universal cognitive factors that have evolved in biological evolutionary timescales, as well as the more "software" products of cultural (and technological/material culture) evolution. A case in point came up in the Buddhism book with the bits about major sectarian splits over the length of fringe on your prayer mat (iirc?). Although the cultural/theological content was unique, the actual flavour of the dispute and the behaviours around it were very reminiscent of dogmatic disputes everywhere and in secular contexts as well as religious. The universality of the "People's Front of Judea" jokes in the Life of Brian, if you like. I could definitely see general forms of dogmatic cognition (and associated social behaviours) as having a cognitive component as well as cultural. I guess the ideology studies pentagon would be something like sociology - social psychology - anthropology - political science - philososophy. I have not yet figured out any relation to computer science or AI, more's the pity

Chaz Firestone

What a fun conversation! Thanks Chris and Matt for having us 🙏

Steelyphil

Wow it was such a treat to hear some vision studies stuff in this podcast! I’m in a vision studies program right now. I’ve really been wondering about the importance of spatial awareness and concept development in children born congenitally blind. I want to see if lacking spatial awareness also impacts language acquisition and the ability to categorize things. I need a cognitive psychologist and a linguist for those sorts of questions. Tricky tricky stuff!

Linda Sears

I am really enjoying this conversation. I wonder if there is an example of a reverse situation where a widely held finding from psychology has been challenged by anthropological research and evidence. By the way, I hope more academics engage in this kind of cross-disciplinary research.