[nitzy]

I think you are misunderstanding what the colored areas mean and how to read the graph. The points where the countries fall on the graph are based on objective empirical data from the answers to the surveys. The colored blobs are just the way that the researchers tried to group countries together for ease of understanding. Also, as someone else mentioned, Ethiopia is not officially a muslim country but is listed with the Islamic countries. "Islamic" was a pretty good way of grouping and describing that section of the graph.

The researchers were pointing out the interesting fact that the Protestant European countries seemed to all answer the questions in the same way and the Catholic European countries were a little bit different and so on. I don't think they even gave a name to the green group in the middle because there was no interesting characteristic that they all shared. They included Poland in the Catholic European blob because it is a Catholic European country and according to the data their cultural views were relatively close to the other Catholic European countries. It would be an interesting follow up study to see if they can find out why this one Catholic European country is "Gerrymandered" so far out from the others. I can't find Portugal on the graph but because I know they are a Catholic European country I can predict what general area of the graph their answers would fall into. That is a hypothesis not conjecture.

So to sum up, I would say that the location of the countries on the graph is scientific. The boundaries of the colored area is a less scientific, general interpretation of the data.

[Gaffer]

I don’t care what you say and explain, there is nothing scientific or explainable about how Poland fits in that group to which it is assigned. The ONLY similar condition I’ve seen in graphs are those that indicate Gerrymandered Political districts.

This whole thing is just not worth discussing anymore. I don’t have anything vested in it other than a willing suspension of disbelief.