A view of Seo-myeon in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, in September 2021. Blue skies and clouds stretch above the Bukhan River.YONHAP
Choi Hoon
The author is a professor of psychology at Hallym University in Chuncheon.
“Living in Chuncheon must be nice, right? You can see the ocean every day.”
“Come on! Chuncheon is an inland city. There’s no ocean.”
“What? Isn’t Chuncheon right next to Sokcho?”
I hear exchanges like this more often than one might expect.
Chuncheon is actually quite far from the sea. Even Sokcho, which somehow feels as though it should be nearby, is more than a 90-minute drive away. Think that is still close? By that standard, Chuncheon practically borders Seoul. The distance from Chuncheon to Sokcho is about 84 kilometers, while Seoul is only about 75 kilometers (46 miles) away.
Why, then, do people mistakenly believe Chuncheon and Sokcho are close together? Because both are grouped within the larger framework of Gangwon.
In one psychology experiment, researchers placed recreational facilities on one side of a map and administrative facilities on the other. A location in the middle was labeled either “city hall” or “pond.” Participants remembered the location as being closer to administrative facilities when it was called city hall, and closer to recreational facilities when it was called a pond. Changing the label changed the category people placed it in — and even its perceived location in their minds.
I, by contrast, perceive Chuncheon and Seoul as quite close. Chuncheon is connected to the Seoul metropolitan subway network, while ITX trains and express buses make travel convenient. That accessibility leads me to group Seoul and Chuncheon into the same sphere of daily life.
We tend to group things we see as related and perceive them as belonging to a single group or category. Psychologist Eleanor Rosch explained this tendency through the concept of cognitive economy. How convenient and efficient is it to organize numerous cities at once under the framework of Gangwon Province? The trade-off is a small error: We may perceive places within the same category as closer together than they really are.
Categories are useful because they reduce the amount of information we must process individually. But the efficiency comes at a cost: once things share a mental label, our minds can blur distinctions between them.
Information we believe we know may itself be only a summary with important details missing. That is why we should always ask whether the basis for our judgment is sufficient. The ability to reduce errors in thinking comes not from stronger conviction, but from developing the habit of examining our own certainty.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
