Comic

Small Steps and Giant Leaps

The Social Phenomenology of Distance

In Small Steps and Giant Leaps, Eviatar Zerubavel explores how categorizing affects our perception of distance through "The Neil Armstrong Effect," the cognitive tendency to exaggerate perceived differences between cultural categories. In Zerubavel's signature style, the book demonstrates the parallel manners in which we have traditionally polarized our conventional visions of categories such as masculinity and femininity or humanity and animality, as well as the parallel symbolic significance of weddings, New Year's Day, and the ritual display of passports upon crossing international borders. Viewing distance "topologically," it shows how we tend to mentally "compress" within-categorical "distances" while "stretching" those between categories. We do so collectively, as members of epistemic communities sharing the same norms, conventions, and traditions of categorizing. When lumping "similar" things together and splitting "different" categories from one another, we do so as social beings. Categorizing involves the social construction of both similarity and difference, and it is attentional norms rather than "logic" that determine which differences "make a difference" and which ones we can effectively disregard.