TL;DR: This interactive exercise uses an ordinary light bulb to demonstrate how people's backgrounds, responsibilities, and cultural experiences shape the way they perceive and describe the same object. By comparing perspectives, participants can discover how worldview and cultural lenses influence communication, interpretation, and understanding across cultural boundaries.
Do your background, life experience, and current circumstances influence how you see and describe something compared with how another person would?
Can descriptions of an ordinary light bulb help us reflect on how the diversity of worldviews causes people to think of and talk about the same things in very different ways?
This graphic came from a Sodexho Marriott Services advertisement in a magazine. It appeared as a full-page ad in Hemispheres, United Airlines' inflight magazine.
The advertisement noted the ways three people with different job responsibilities might describe a light bulb:
The ad's punchline was "To us, it's the importance of seeing things differently."
Describe this object in two or more different ways without using the terms "light bulb" or "lightbulb." Identify the kind of person most likely to use each description.
After writing your descriptions, compare them with the advertisement's descriptions below, which reflect the perspectives of a vice president of finance, a risk manager, and a director of engineering.
This exercise illustrates how the categories and mental models we develop through experience influence how we see and describe the world. It also helps us understand how cultural lenses shape our worldview.
To a vice president of finance, it's an energy conservation opportunity.
To a risk manager, it's a critical safety device.
To a director of engineering, it's code LB36-85/N7 in the electrical monitoring software.
Other identifying labels that have been used for the simple light bulb include incandescent lamp, filament bulb and, in Australia and New Zealand, light globe.
-- Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
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