20 Activity – Categories Defined by Similarity

We understand categories based on similarity using the properties that are shared by category members. But this means that when a category has lots of members, our understanding of the category will be biased by which members we are most familiar with.

Let’s return to the category of birds we used in the last chapter. You did a quiz about typical birds, and the best answer given the set of birds there was that a pigeon is a very typical bird. But that judgment depends on the birds that you are comparing.
 

This activity shows that typical birds in each of these environments will be very different from each other!   And that means that people who live near bodies of water, in deserts, or in the mountains think of birds differently.