Spatial reference points are larger than themselves. This isn’t really a paradox: landmarks are themselves, but they also define neighborhoods around themselves.
(A)
In a paradigm that has been repeated on many campuses, researchers first collect a list of campus landmarks from students. Then they ask another group of students to estimate the distances between pairs of locations, some to landmarks, some to ordinary buildings on campus.
(B)
This asymmetry of distance estimates violates the most elementary principles of Euclidean distance, that the distance from A to B must be the same as the distance from B to A. Judgments of distance, then, are not necessarily coherent.
(C)
The remarkable finding is that distances from an ordinary location to a landmark are judged shorter than distances from a landmark to an ordinary location. So, people would judge the distance from Pierre’s house to the Eiffel Tower to be shorter than the distance from the Eiffel Tower to Pierre’s house. Like black holes, landmarks seem to pull ordinary locations toward themselves, but ordinary places do not.
* asymmetry: 비대칭