What is a penguin? Is it more like a dolphin (smooth, able to swim underwater), or more like an eagle (has wings, lays eggs)? Depending on their upbringing, knowledge, experience and scientific background, people classify even simple concepts ("what is a penguin?") completely differently.
Recent psychology research shows that conceptual differences turn up everywhere and that people are usually oblivious to these disparities. Neuroscience studies demonstrate that they are underpinned by differences in how the brain represents concepts, a process influenced by politics, emotion and character.
Differences in thinking that have been shaped by lifetimes of experience, practice or beliefs can be almost impossible to shift. But two steps offer a way forward: making people become aware of their differences and encouraging them to choose new language that is free of conceptual baggage:
They occur not just for kinds of things, such as the whole category of birds, but also for specific exemplars for that category, such as a penguin. Kidd and her colleagues asked participants to give both “feature” judgements (whether a penguin is noisy) and “similarity” judgements (whether a penguin is more similar to a chicken or a whale). By analyzing how participants’ responses clustered into groups, the researchers estimated that “at least ten to thirty quantifiably different variants of word meanings exist for even common nouns,” according to their study.
They also showed that people are usually unaware that "...others do not agree on a meaning. "People generally overestimate the degree to which other people will share the same concept as them when they're speaking," Kidd says, which helps explain why people talk past each other so much.
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