Figure 1.

In Abbott's novella, A. Square cannot perceive his world as anything other than two dimensional. From his limited perspective (“Flatlander View”; bottom), a three‐dimensional entity (sphere) appears to be changing sizes before him (growing and shrinking circle). In reality (top), this entity is simply moving through a lower‐dimensional plane, but A. Square's limited perspective leads to a false conclusion about the nature of reality. For similar reasons, psychological scientists may falsely conclude that the number of dimensions that accurately characterize psychological phenomena is sufficiently small, viewing the world like Flatlanders, even if in reality the complexity of psychological phenomena is high dimensional.