Pointing seems to be in our nature: When people want to draw attention to something, we instinctively extend an index finger. This gesture has been observed across the globe, suggesting that it’s a universal human impulse, perhaps like yawning or laughing.Â
But research my collaborators and I recently published shows that pointing is not simply a matter of human nature. How we point is also a matter of culture. These findings suggest that cognitive scientists still have a lot to learn from other cultures about why humans behave in the ways that they do.
In 2009, my collaborator, Rafael Núñez, and I joined a fieldwork project in Papua New Guinea’s remote interior. The goal was to study the language and culture of the Yupno, an indigenous group of some 8,000 people.
While conducting our interviews, we noticed a distinct way the Yupno would point: They would scrunch their noses while looking toward wherever they wanted to direct your attention. To outsiders, it could easily look like an expression of disgust. But there’s nothing negative about it.
This “nose-pointing” gesture, it turned out, was essentially undocumented. After we returned to the U.S., we published some preliminary observations using examples from our videos. But the study left a bunch of questions unanswered. One in particular kept popping up: Was facial pointing just an infrequent quirk, or did the Yupno use it as much – or even more than – hand-pointing? We didn’t have a good answer. [...]
We devised a simple communication game that’s played in pairs. One person sits down with five square cloths on the ground in front of them, forming a plus sign. Off to one side is a tray with a number of small, colorful objects on it – beanbags, cylinders and cubes. The person is shown a photo with eight of the objects arranged on the square cloths in a particular way. Their task is to tell their partner how to arrange the objects to match the photo. The instructions don’t mention pointing. It’s assumed that the players will spontaneously point to instruct their partner.
We played this game with 16 Yupno adults and then, later, 16 undergraduates in California. The Yupno and Americans pointed at about the same rate. But how they pointed was a different story. As you might guess, the Americans almost always used their hands – 95 percent of the time, in fact. But the Yupno participants used their hands much less – only 34 percent of the time. The rest of the time they pointed with the scrunched nose gesture or just a toss of the head.
In the Yupno, at least, pointing with the face is not just an “occasional alternative.” Our experiment shows it’s how they respond to the impulse to point.
