The other day, when I was explaining the aim of this blog to a friend of mine, I told him the very illustrating example of how city kids think that cows were purple because of the advertisement for a particular brand of chocolate. The study wonderfully demonstrated how we city folks are alienated from the natural world!
" … In 1995, 40,000 (fourty thousand) children were to color a cow during a competition in Bavaria. Every third child chose the color purple. The Milka Purple Cow is a symbol of quality…" (from the official Milka website, translated from German).
Not true.
No evidence.
None whatsoever.
It turns out it's a myth.
The Journal "Psychologie Heute" published the results of a study by the name "Studie Lila Kuh", which was undertaken in 1997 to investigate this alarming phenomenon (whether, and how serious, the "purple cow syndrome" was). According to this scientific study, only about 1 out of every 100 children that were questioned replied that the color of cows was purple. City kids did not think so more often than country kids, nor did younger ones reply "purple" more often than older ones. Publicly and privately funded projects continue to take place using the theme "purple cow" to address a problem that doesn't exist.
Well, the problem of alienation from nature probably does exist. But the cow, in its purpleness, is not the problem.
Nor is it purple dogs, for that matter. It is YELLOW DUCKS!!
My yellow rubber ducky is supposed to be a problem? But everybody KNOWS that ducks are yellow!
References (I apologize, they are all in German)
- Brämer, Rainer (1998) Wie Jugendliche heute die Natur - oder was sie dafür halten - erleben. Psychologie heute, Issue 8/1998: 64-77)
- Full report is available at: "Jugendreport Natur 2003" (http://www.sdw-nrw.de/aktiv/ente.htm)
- Follow-up study is available at "Studie Lila Kuh 1997" (http://www.sdw-nrw.de/aktiv/lila.htm)
- See also Wikipedia: http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Enzyklopädie_der_populären_Irrtümer/_Biologie#K.C3.BChe_.282.29:_Gro.C3.9Fstadtkinder_denken.2C_K.C3.BChe_seien_lila
- Example of a current project that uses the theme "purple cow" http://www.oekoherz.de/aktivi/2024.htm
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1 comment:
This reminds me of back in the day when I was a chubby, 1-foot tall kid in England. I would look out the car window, point and say "cow coming" everytime the car approached a pasture crowded with cattle, until it drove my parents mad!! I distinctly remember that most of them were black-and-white!!
Come to think of it, though, here in the Egyptian countryside I have never seen a black-and-white cow! Mostly white-and-brown or just...dirty :) I do know, though, that the peasants would rather lose everything they own as long as they keep their cow!
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