Cultural blunders make people better thinkers

It seems to me that the segregation of people of differing views shows this, with the mindless acceptance of whatever their particular group favors.

Public Release: 13-Oct-2015
Cultural blunders make people better thinkers
Amid mass migrations, stress can accrue as refugees and longtime residents experience cultural differences. Researchers at USC and other institutions discovered a silver lining: People encountering cultural gaffes flex their brains more.
University of Southern California

•••••

People are more likely to think and behave mindlessly - buying things, eating more and performing poorly on cognitive reasoning tests when they encounter a cultural situation that meets their expectations, such as a white wedding. The researchers referred to these situations as moments of "cultural fluency."

The opposite is true for people confronted with moments of "cultural disfluency" - such as the wrong holiday plates at a party or a "goodbye-and-good-riddance" obituary. Then people perform better on cognitive reasoning tests and are less likely to succumb to impulse purchases and consumption.

"Culture sets up a general blueprint for the way things should work, so that if things unfold as we expect, we don't have to think," said corresponding author Daphna Oyserman, Dean's Professor of Psychology and Co-director of the USC Dornsife Center for Mind and Society. "It's good because it frees up our cognitive capacity to do other things. But it also has a downside because it means we're not processing details. What we showed in these studies is that this lack of attention carries over to unrelated tasks."

Oyserman said the study's results show that people shift from a low-level, associative thought process to higher level, systematic thinking when they encounter a situation in which something is awry. This shift in intensity is the difference between coasting downhill on a bike and pedaling uphill; it can raise people's stress levels.

"Cultural disfluency can facilitate a shift to systematic mindset and set up feelings of distrust and suspicion with potentially problematic consequences depending on the context," the researchers warned.

•••••

"We are used to thinking about culture shock as negative and something that happens to those who move, but the disfluency that results in culture shock has some positive consequences for thinking," Oyserman said. "Disfluency can also occur for people who haven't moved, especially if there are large groups of others who are using a different cultural script are arriving at their shores. For them, those moments of what should be cultural fluency are harder to predict."