This study was mentioned in Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind" - but unfortunately I don't quite remember the exact details, and I didn't write notes when reading =)

But, anyhow, the basic idea was that in empirical studies they found some interesting correlations: Typically people in individualistic cultures ("The West") find it easier to see that the horizontal lines are of same length - whereas members of more collective cultures perceive the horizontal lines differently. And this was supposed to be because individualistic mindset sees the world composed of separate individuals; the rectangle and the horizontal line are seen as independent entities, and their properties are unrelated. But a more collective way of seeing thigs is to perceive every individual belonging to a group, and defined by relationships. Thus, the horizontal line is seen as a part of the bigger figure, and if the proportions of the main figure change, then the horizontal line seems different, too.

The whole point in this is to recognize that how deep our differences are. Sometimes it is surprisingly difficult to maintain a rational discussion between people with different world views - and that is party because people are not only interpreting the social world according to their different values, no, they might be perceiving even the physical world and geometrical figures differently, because their sub-conscious mind in pre-processing information in different ways.

That's why I think that in order to better learn understand each other we need to develop our sub-conscious information processing; learning different models which help us to understand how others see the world. It might still be that ourselves we use just one model, seeing the world in a structured way, yet having some understanding of there being alternative ways of seeing the world...

Hmm - maybe I'll write a blog post about these kind of things, some point in January =)