Why Lévi-Strauss (the Anthropologist, not the Brand) Would Approve of Card Sorting
While many UXers are not trained in anthropology, the fact remains that most of us are, knowingly or unknowingly, doing anthropology.
As a relatively new and ever-changing discipline, UX Research often produces knowledge quickly and primarily for practical ends. Although UX research spans the lifecycle from exploratory ethnographic research to rapid prototyping, there’s the ever-present capitalistic push to do it all faster.
Due to this rather frenetic rhythm, the theoretical basis behind the practice of UX Research has been less explored. This is likely because, as UX Researchers, we are paid to produce insights on very pragmatic problems rather than to explain to our clients the theoretical foundations of our analyses. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pause to reflect, once in a while, on why the things we do make sense from a theoretical point of view.
This article attempts to do just that by exploring the anthropological reasoning behind one of the most ubiquitous UX Research tools: card sorting. While this simple and humble method has commonly been associated with cognitive psychology and information processing theory, its logic also echoes one of the most prominent intellectual movements in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology: Structuralism. This school of thought, founded among others by the notable anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, has much to tell us about our duty to understand how and why people categorize the world — in our case, the digital world.
Why would any UXer want to open that big black theoretical box that informs their practice? Let’s be honest, it is not very likely that a client will stop you in the middle of a card sorting session to ask you what social or cognitive theory backs your technique. Neither will your boss. But delving into the theoretical substance of UX practice can be, for starters, incredibly stimulating and provide a fertile ground for new ideas and methodologies to grow. Anthropological knowledge in particular can deepen our cultural sensitivity and help us stay away from our own cultural biases and assumptions. This will make us far more nuanced in our analyses and insights, which will directly benefit our clients with enhanced accuracy and precision.
What is Structural Anthropology?
But first, what is anthropology? As broad as it may sound, anthropology is the discipline that studies the human experience. Historically, this has meant examining various human experiences, identifying what sets them apart from each other, and uncovering what may explain such differences. Thus, anthropology is, at its core, a comparative discipline. It compares cultures, beliefs, economic models, social structures, modes of production, exchange, and consumption to identify both variations and commonalities among them.
However, for a structural anthropologist, the goal of anthropology should be somewhat more specific: to identify the underlying structures that shape and govern how people think, behave, and believe. You might think this definition is essentially the same one I gave earlier — the study of the human experience — but back in the day, this new approach to conducting and understanding anthropology was quite revolutionary. Up until the 50s’, anthropologists were more interested in documenting thoroughly every little detail about the lives of non-western societies and concluded, based on their behavior, rituals, and beliefs, that they were ‘savage’ people or primitive. Lévi-Strauss, a man of both theory and fieldwork, wasn’t pleased with the way their colleagues were doing anthropology.
To counter this inaccurate portrayal of humans and culture, Levi-Strauss conducted ethnographic research in several tribes, mostly in Brazil. There, among the Nambikwara, Caduveo, and the Bororo, he discovered that there was a “structural” similarity between the myths of different tribes, and concluded that there are universal mental structures across cultures, which inform the way people organize and categorize their world. In other words, he found that all humans share the same mental structure that shapes culture and cognition. In The Savage Mind (1962), Lévi-Strauss exposed the immense complexity of the systems of classification that “primitive” cultures from around the world use to make sense of the world. Speaking about the ways in which the people of Siberia classify the world for medicinal purposes, he wrote:
The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as ‘going together’, and whether some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings. Classifying, as opposed to not classifying, has a value of its own, whatever form the classification may take.
In this eloquently poetic yet scientific manner, Lévi-Strauss shifted the focus away from the “oddness” or primitiveness of these practices. Instead, he endeavored to uncover the fundamental structures that could elucidate why people categorized the world as they did — such as why the woodpecker’s beak and the man’s tooth belong under the same category for the Iakoute.
This theoretical shift away from cultural specificity and towards understanding common structures between different peoples was critical for anthropological practice. It brought about a new way of doing anthropology, where the focus was on unveiling patterns and commonalities, instead of just describing what was observable. It also connected cognitive and anthropological theories, bringing anthropology and psychology closer together.
Structural Anthropology and Card Sorting: Understanding how People Make Sense of the World
Just as Lévi-Strauss aimed to comprehend how people classified the world to navigate it, we UX Researchers and friends of card sorting are essentially pursuing a similar goal. While he was trying to make sense of why a woodpecker’s beak can be together in the same category with a man’s tooth, we are trying to understand why users consider that toys and sports should be a single category in a website. By asking participants which groupings make more sense to them and why, we are trying, just like Lévi-Strauss, to uncover the underlying structure or fundamental worldview that informs their categorization.
Myths and Mythemes
To bolster his argument that common structures and patterns underlie the infinite diversity of cultural practices and beliefs, Lévi-Strauss also sought to identify patterns and relationships between the foundational myths of different societies. He employed myths as a proxy for culture as a whole, and identified the mythemes, or the smaller unit of a myth (akin to a phoneme in linguistics), to see if he could find them among other myths from different parts of the world. These mythemes can also be conceived of as mental models, defined by cognitive psychology as internal representations of external reality used by people to interact with the world around them.
Lévi-Strauss compared these mythemes across cultures and discovered recurring patterns, themes, and, notably, binary oppositions, such as high vs. low, inside vs. outside, person vs. animal, and nature vs. culture, through which individuals make sense of the world. These oppositions organize the relationships between different elements of the world and explain fundamental concepts, values, and symbols for broader cultural themes. For Lévi-Strauss, these binary oppositions were fundamental to how people perceive reality and behave, but also to how people classify the world and make groups of things.
The act of sorting cards into categories also reflects the concept of binary oppositions in structural anthropology. Behind the way people decide to group elements into different categories, a set of binary oppositions and mythemes may be at play. For instance, users may want to categorize the information on an apparel website based on perceived dichotomies such as “man vs. woman,” “child vs. adult,” or “plus size vs. petite.”
However natural these oppositions may appear to us today, they are, in fact, deeply cultural and say a lot about our place and time — about the myths we use to understand and navigate the world. Not every society in history has divided its people between men and women, nor has the difference between a child and an adult always been so evident in every culture.
Hence, understanding why users would prefer to see certain elements fall under certain categories is at its core an exercise in anthropological decoding, where the culture under study is the user’s mental model of information organization. Each card in a card sorting exercise can be regarded as a symbol or element of a culture. The way participants arrange these cards offers insight into the underlying structure or ‘grammar’ of their mental models.
How can UX Researchers incorporate structural anthropological thinking in our day-to-day practice?
We can start by reframing our understanding of what it is that we are doing when we look at users’ behavior: we are trying to uncover the underlying structures that govern how users categorize and interact with the digital world, or, in other words, we are “decoding” their mental models of information organization. Going into research projects with this goal in mind, we might be able to provide much deeper insight into the fundamental criteria that our users are putting into play when making decisions and interacting with digital assets. This information is, as we know, incredibly valuable for our clients.
And how can this help us with card sorting specifically? Well, going into card sorting with a mindset of identifying the key binary oppositions or mythemes that are informing the way the users are grouping elements together or setting them apart could make us much more accurate and precise when going on to design categories that mirror the users’ mental models. This will definitely make our interfaces much more usable and enhance the user experience.
In light of this, UX Researchers should not merely be rapid solution finders but also take the time to understand the theory behind their practice. By doing so, not only will we improve our methods and the quality of our insights, but we will also contribute to the theoretical growth of the field.
