This article will literally turn your world upside down
Now that I’m living in Australia, a couple of my US-based friends and I play a monthly, online version of Catan.
To keep track of our wins, I created a scorecard. To be cute, I wanted to add a map with little pins showing the cities we all reside in: New York, Indianapolis, and Melbourne.
Thinking about which map to use triggered a fun existential, thought exercise that led me down a rabbit hole (and yes, really, it was fun).
I love maps and geography. The world’s a big place and being able to look at a map and see where a city or country is helps make the world feel a little smaller and more familiar.
Going to school in the US, most maps would have looked similar to this:
For a long time, I thought maps were just facts, that they just were what they were. But I was wrong.
My first memory of something that challenged my thinking on maps involved the below clip from the West Wing.
If you don’t watch the clip, the tldr is that the West Wing put a name to the map I was familiar with, the Mercator projection (above), and pointed out not only that it was deeply flawed, but that there were other types of maps that could and should be used instead. It put the Gall-Peters projection map… on the map (I couldn’t resist).
Africa, in the Mercator projection, is roughly the same size as Greenland, while in the Gall-Peters projection, Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland.
I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that my underlying understanding about how the world visually looked could be so out of whack. I had never considered that modern maps were even something that could be debated. And, in addition to geometric projection, attributes like vertical orientation and ocean-centricity could all be adjusted to create different maps — all viable — of the same planet.
I was forced to pause, think, and reflect.
Once you realise you can’t take a map at face value, you start to wonder how a distorted map affects your thinking and worldview.
If you want to fall into your own maps rabbit hole, I’d highly recommend taking at least a scan of “List of map projections” on Wikipedia.
At a minimum, play around with just one, like this Hobo-Dyer projection map. Start by imagining where you are on the map. You should be envisioning the top of your head because, unless you’re lying down or crawling, you are perpendicular to Earth.
It’s gonna sound ludicrous but flip the map upside down so the “south” is on the top. South doesn’t mean down, so why can’t it be on the top?
Picture yourself again. How does that make you feel?
Now, how about we make the map Pacific-centric?
Picture yourself yet again. Does your brain hurt?
All these maps are conveying the same information, they just happen to convey it differently. Physically, you’ve never moved, but simultaneously, on the map iterations, you’ve now been in three different positions. Without additional context, none of these maps is inherently good or bad, just different. But they do impact the way we think.
Research suggests that north-south maps displayed as up-down maps have “psychological consequences” for viewers:
In general, north is associated with richer people, more expensive real estate, and higher altitude, while south is associated with poorer people, cheaper prices, and lower altitude (the “north-south bias”). When participants were presented with south-up oriented maps, this north-south bias disappeared.
Researchers posit the observed association between map-position and goodness/badness (north=good; south=bad) is caused by the combination of (i) the convention of consistently placing north at the top of maps, and (ii) a much more general association between vertical position and goodness/badness (up=good, down=bad), which has been documented in numerous contexts (e.g., power/status, profits/prices, affect/emotion, and even the divine). (Wikipedia)
This research is all the more reason why it’s important to challenge our underlying assumptions from time to time and examine how they might be impacting our thinking and the thinking of others.
What in your life or organisation is the traditional, un-questioned map?
The map I settled on for our scorecard is a pseudocylindrical, Pacific-centric Equal Area projection map. I picked it because it was the visualisation that made us (Australia and the United States) look as close together as possible. Being so far away, even just feeling a little bit closer warms my heart.
Never be afraid to question your map.
Get a new map. Flip it upside down. Cut it in half and swap the sides. Does it feel weird? It probably does. Take time to reflect on why it feels weird.
The world hasn’t changed, but the way you think about it, and your place on it, just might.
Curiously Yours — Seb
