Blinkers and intuitions
Our intuitions may inadvertently fit us with blinkers
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If you live in the UK as an expatriate and have a name like mine, you stand out. Yes, you have to learn to live with a wide variety of creative pronunciations of your moniker, but it has advantages too. Having a rare name means people remember you more easily, and if they have to look it up, the odds are there is going to be just one person with your name.
It is easy to extrapolate from this, of course. My name is unusual for many people in Britain, and therefore very rare, so intuitively it follows that names that are unusual to me are also rare. Easy to do, but easily mistaken. Time and time again, when I look for the twitter handle of the author of an interesting scientific paper, my intuition is that there will be hardly any users with, say, a particular Chinese or Korean name — simply because Chinese or Korean names are not common in my environment. And then, to my surprise, I find that there are dozens of people named Min-Hui Li or Sungsik Park.
Commonly unusual
The assumption that the things that are either common or unusual to us are common or unusual in general is, well, not that unusual. You have probably come across it on web forms where you need to enter your address — only, in your country it follows the town, whereas in the country where the site is based, it precedes the town. Or more annoyingly for many people with an Asian surname, the requirement could be that your last name has at least three characters.
Aargh! A spider in my bed! (image via YouTube)
If you have young children around you, you may be familiar with the cartoon character of Peppa Pig, a charming piglet girl exploring the world with her parents and her little brother George. In one of the episodes, she encounters a spider known as Mr Skinnylegs. Peppa is frightened of the creature, but Daddy Pig reassures her that “spiders are very, very small, and can’t hurt you”. This is pretty good advice for young people in the UK, where Peppa Pig originates from. But when the episode was shown in Australia in 2012, a…
