Essays
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Culture as Situated Cognition - Oyserman, Daphna
Culture‐as‐situated‐cognition (CSC) theory proposes that culture can be thought of at three levels. At the highest level, culture is a human universal, a “good enough” solution to universal needs. At the intermediate level, culture is a specific meaning‐making framework, a “mindset” that influences what is attended to, which goals or mental procedure is salient. At the most proximal level, culture is a set of particular practices within a specific society, time, and place which influences what feels fluent and to‐be‐expected. Cross‐national comparisons demonstrate that differences exist. To understand what observed differences imply for underlying process, a situated cognition framework and experimental methods are needed. Indeed, individualistic and collectivistic mindsets are accessible cross‐culturally, so both can be primed. Whether an individualistic or collectivistic cultural mindset is salient in the moment matters, resulting in downstream consequences for meaning making, self‐processes, willingness to invest in relationships, and for complex mental procedures. Between‐group differences arise in part from momentary cues that make either individualistic or collectivistic mindset accessible. Within a culture, people experience cultural fluency if situations match their expectations and cultural disfluency if they do not. Cultural disfluency has downstream consequences for choice and behavior. Moving from one culture to another is difficult because people experience many situations in which they either do not know what to expect or their expectations are not met and feedback as to the nature of the mismatch is almost always ambiguous. For these reasons, while cultural processes are universal, acculturation is often fraught, lengthy, and incomplete. -
Identity‐Based Motivation - Oyserman, Daphna
People believe that they know who they are and that who they are matters for what they do. These core beliefs seem so inherent to conceptualizations of what it means to have a self as to require no empirical support. After all, what is the point of a concept of self if there is no stable thing to have a concept about, and who would care if that concept was stable if it was not useful in making it through the day? Yet the evidence for action‐relevance and stability are surprisingly sparse. This entry outlines identity‐based motivation theory which takes a new look at these assumptions and makes three core predictions termed dynamic construction, action‐readiness, and interpretation of difficulty. That is, rather than being stable, which identities come to mind and what they mean are dynamically constructed in context. People interpret situations and difficulties in ways that are congruent with currently active identities and prefer identity‐congruent to identity‐incongruent actions. When action feels identity‐congruent, experienced difficulty highlights that the behavior is important and meaningful. When action feels identity‐incongruent, the same difficulty suggests that the behavior is pointless and “not for people like me.”