Available online at www.sciencedirect.
com
ScienceDirect
What does a priming perspective reveal about culture:
culture-as-situated cognition
Daphna Oyserman
‘Between-group’ comparison models of culture imply that
adaptations to group living are not represented cross-
culturally, but if people are either individualists who make sense
of the world by separating out main issues and underlying rules
or collectivists who make sense of the world by connecting and
relating, how is it that people can do both? Culture-as-situated
cognition theory explains how: Many seemingly fixed cultural
differences can be traced to differences in the accessible
constructs — cultural mindsets — that come to mind when
situations render them accessible. Social priming paradigms
demonstrate that people from ostensibly different cultures have
more than their chronically accessible cultural mindset
available for use, and that momentarily accessible mindset
matters, influencing cognitive processing, judgment,
reasoning, and performance.
Address
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, SGM 803,
3620 South McClintock Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061, United
States
Corresponding author: Oyserman, Daphna (daphna.oyserman@usc.edu)
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:94–99
This review comes from a themed issue on Social priming
Edited by Fritz Strack and Norbert Schwarz
For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial
Available online 18th October 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.10.002
2352-250X/# 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
What does a priming perspective reveal about
culture: culture as situated cognition
Do people first attend to focal objects or to the whole
visual array? Are students better off if they focus on trying
to learn or on avoiding incompetence? Is well-being more
a function of personal efficacy or of fitting in? While
superficially different, in each case, the answer seems to
depend in part on whether one is a member of an indi-
vidualistic ‘go-your-own-way’ culture or of a collectivistic
‘pay-attention-to-your-social-location’ culture [1–4]. The
insight that culture matters leads to another puzzle, which
is that minor contextual cues are sufficient to switch
people from individualistic to collectivistic mindsets with-
out need for lengthy socialization in a different culture
[5]. Culture-as-situated-cognition theory [6–8] solves this
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:94–99
puzzle by building on social cognition research on concept
accessibility to integrate literature documenting what
appear to be chronic cultural differences with literature
documenting situated flexibility. In other words, this
theory re-conceptualizes cultural differences: rather than
being the result of fixed, between-group differences, the
differences are a result of what mindset is chronically
accessible.
In doing so, culture-as-situated cognition theory high-
lights two aspects of culture’s consequences that other-
wise escape attention and hence have been largely
ignored in the larger cultural and cross-cultural psycholo-
gy literature. First, it highlights that people have access to
and can use more than one culturally grounded mental
representation, depending on which is cued in context,
and that this does not require bicultural or multicultural
socialization [7]. Indeed, people typically do belong to
more than one culture — they can be socialized into
American individualistic culture, and at the same time
into proximal cultures based in other social groups (gen-
der, social class, race-ethnicity, 2, 8). Second, it highlights
that people have a culturally grounded mental model of
how situations should unfold, which when disturbed cues
increased systematic reasoning (to examine whether
something is wrong). Both of these processes have to
do with what is accessible at the moment in the context of
one’s everyday life, outside the laboratory, as detailed
next.
Situated cognition, accessible knowledge,
and priming
Situated cognition focuses on the impact of social con-
texts on thinking and action, or, ‘thinking in the world’
[9–12]. Situated approaches suggest that ‘thinking is for
doing’ with the implication that people are sensitive to
their immediate environment, use the subset of all their
knowledge that is accessible in the moment and interpret
what comes to mind in light of contextual demands
[10,13]. What comes to mind can be knowledge (semantic
content, [14], goals, [15], and procedures, [6,11,16]) or
metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty while
thinking about content, goals, and procedures [17]. Un-
less they have reason to exclude it, people tend to include
accessible knowledge and metacognitive experience of
ease (‘fluency’) or difficulty (‘disfluency’) in their judg-
ments [17]. Each yields a signal as to how to process
information to make sense of experience and hence how
to respond. While people are sensitive to what comes to
mind and to their experience of thinking about it, they are
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not sensitive to the specific source of accessible informa-
tion or accessible feelings of ease and difficulty [17,18].
Hence, information and feelings may carry over to inform
judgment on subsequent tasks — even if the information
or feelings on one’s mind are not relevant to the task at
hand [17,18].
Culture as situated cognition
Culture-as-situated cognition (CSC) theory connects
the core premises of situated cognition theories with
a broad formulation of what culture is and does [22,23].
As a starting point, CSC assumes that human culture
developed from the survival necessity of connecting
with others and adapting to group living [24,25]. Living
together requires that people coordinate and organize
their relationships, clarify group boundaries, and notice
and reward innovation so that it can be imitated or
exploited [26,27]. Coordinating and organizing relation-
ships and noticing and rewarding innovation requires
sensitivity to others’ perspectives (‘social tuning’) as
well as ability to control one’s own responses and focus
(‘self-regulation’) [23,28,29]. In each society, practices
evolve to create ‘good enough’ practices to regulate
relationships, specify group boundaries and what to
do about them, and spotlight when innovation is accept-
ed or valued [5,23,26,27,30,31]. Though solutions are
‘good enough’ rather than optimal, once developed,
they become ‘sticky’ because they become imbued with
meaning as the ways ‘we’ do things [30]. Together these
practices form ‘culture’. A particular culture can be
understood as a particular set of practices within a
particular society, time and place; these practices do
not need to be the best or most efficient solution; it
suffices that they are better than no solution [30]. In this
way, culture becomes the sense of a tacit operating code
or meaning making framework through which people
make sense of their world [32] and understand what
people want and how they go about getting it [33].
Indeed, people are sensitive to cues about when to
imitate (fit in) and when to innovate [34,35] and when
group boundaries matter [25,36].
This formulation of culture does not highlight the be-
tween-society differences in the core concern (connec-
tions, boundaries, innovation) on which individuals focus,
even though cultural psychologists have often focused on
these differences. In particular, cultural psychologists
have typically highlighted the differences between indi-
vidualism and collectivism and argued that these differ-
ences are due to differences in ecological niches (e.g.
[37]). While interesting, such a between-society interpre-
tation of cultural differences focuses attention on distal
past contexts to the exclusion of present day contexts and
implies that differences in niches create either a focus on
individualism or on collectivism. Both of these assump-
tions result in predictions that differ from the predictions
made by CSC as detailed next.
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Culture-as-situated-cognition Oyserman 95
Cultural mindsets
A mindset is a knowledge structure including content,
procedures, and goals. A first core prediction of CSC is
that each society has practices linked to highlighting
group boundaries and structuring relationships — doing
things ‘our way’, fitting in, and belonging, as well as
practices linked to innovation. These practices involve
content, procedure, and goals that scaffold collectivis-
tic, honor, and individualistic mindsets. This implies
that in any society, each of these mindsets can be made
accessible.
A second core prediction of CSC is that which cultural
mindset is accessible in the moment matters. The
accessible mindset includes content (one’s own values,
one’s beliefs about what is normative, one’s beliefs
about what is right), goals (stick out, fit in, protect
reputation), and procedures (separating, connecting,
ranking). Part of the power of cuing a cultural mindset
comes from cuing particular descriptive norms [29].
Descriptive norms have two possible channels of effect,
one is to make accessible what people usually do and
the other is to make accessible the idea of others more
generally — that others are present, that others are
watching [28]. People in different societies should be
sensitive to cues to use individualistic, collectivistic,
and honor mindsets [6]. While initially linked to par-
ticular practices, these mindsets, once activated, should
induce a general disposition to process information in a
particular way and influence judgments and behavior in
much the same way that activating cultural identity
influences them [7,38,39]. Whether a cued mindset
helps or hinders performance depends on its fit to
the task at hand [40]. Evidence for this flexibility
abounds, and individualistic and collectivistic mindsets
are easily activated across different modern [6] and
traditional societies [41,42].
To test the effect of accessible cultural mindset on
current judgment in the laboratory, structure priming
methods are used so that the researcher has control over
which mindset is accessible and can demonstrate its
effects. Because the use of accessible mindsets should
depend on features of the situation, priming procedures
typically involve two ostensibly unrelated tasks. The first
task is the priming task. Unless its relevance is under-
mined, the specific content, procedure, goal or metacog-
nitive interpretation made temporarily accessible in the
first task carries over to the next task, whether or not it
would otherwise have come to mind (e.g. [11,14,17,21]).
Importantly, features of situations can only bring to mind
knowledge a person already has, thus priming a chroni-
cally collectivistic person with an individualistic mindset
can shift accessible mindset only if that individualistic
mindset is available for use. Otherwise, knowledge has to
be learned and does not spring forth from brief exposure
to a situation [19,20].
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:94–99
96 Social priming
To prime individualistic or collectivistic mindsets, it is
necessary to manipulate the accessibility of individualis-
tic or collectivistic semantic content (values, self-defini-
tions), goals, or mental procedures. To see if priming
matters, it is necessary to then assess the impact of the
accessible cultural mindset (see 6 for review and meta-
analysis). A wide array of subtle situational cues can ‘turn
on’ or elicit either an individualistic or a collectivistic
mindset [6]. Within-subjects, priming makes both acces-
sible and predicts that effects will be driven by whichever
is more strongly endorsed [6]. Between-subjects, priming
makes either accessible and predicts different average
responses. In both cases, priming involves a carry over of
previously stored cultural-relevant mental content, pro-
cedures, or goals to a subsequent task. Individualistic
cultural mindsets make goals, content, procedural knowl-
edge about separating accessible while collectivistic
mindsets do the same for goals, content and procedural
knowledge about connecting.
Priming techniques cover the range from standard tech-
niques to culture-specific ones. Standard techniques in-
clude subliminal priming and creating sentences from a
scrambled word set including individualism-relevant and
collectivism-relevant words such as ‘unique’, ‘different’
or ‘similar’, ‘together’. In each of these priming techni-
ques, the words are incidentally processed; for example,
in the sentence task, while creating the sentences. The
content, procedures and goals are simultaneously cued
during incidental processing of the words and are then
non-consciously carried over to the subsequent task.
Culture-specific priming tasks have the same feature of
setting up incidental processing that is carried over to a
subsequent task. The three most common priming tech-
niques used in this literature were specifically developed
to study culture [6]. One involves reading a short story
about a general who had to choose to promote someone
and either based the choice on reaping advantage for his
family or on getting the best person for the job [43].
Another involves reading a short paragraph about a trip
[44] or other activity [45] and circling the pronouns (which
are either first person singular — I, me, my, or first person
plural — we, our, us). A third involves considering simi-
larities or differences with family and friends [43]. Less
common culture-specific priming techniques include see-
ing a company logo with a single vs. multiple stick figures
[46] or receiving instructions that focus on analytic or
holistic strategies, or instructions either in a language
associated with individualism (e.g. English) or associated
with collectivism (e.g. Chinese or Russian) [47] (studies,
for a review, 6). The heterogeneity of priming techniques
across studies is a strength, in that it makes it possible to
begin to examine whether effects in priming studies are
limited to a particular priming task or generalize across
tasks, and whether effect sizes from priming studies are
similar to effect sizes in cross-group comparison work [5].
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:94–99
Priming techniques can be used in one of three ways:
within participants comparing two priming conditions,
between participants comparing priming and control con-
ditions, and between participants comparing two priming
conditions (with or without an added control condition).
The most common usage is to randomize participants to
one of two priming conditions (individualistic or collec-
tivistic prime) and compare responses to a dependent
variable [6]. Less frequently, priming can occur within
subjects; this technique typically involves asking people
to rate how much they agree or disagree with statements
relevant to individualistic and collectivistic values either
before or after the dependent variable [48]. This tech-
nique allows researchers to study the relative effect of
both cultural primes. Some researchers prefer to use only
one prime and compare results of the prime condition to a
no-prime control condition [49].
An accessible collectivistic mindset increases the likeli-
hood that people will spontaneously process information
as if relational cues and group boundaries were important.
For example, participants primed with collectivistic
mindset are more likely than those primed with an
individualistic mindset to remember who was presented
in advertisements; they also judged the advertised prod-
uct more negatively when the presenter was not a good fit
with the product [50]. Collectivistic mindset primed
participants are quicker to use contextualized but not
decontextualized trait information in judging others [51].
Collectivistic mindset primed participants are also more
likely to experience two choices they made at the same
time to be related rather than separate [46]. If only one of
their choices be fulfilled, they preferred to opt out of both
or to pay more to preserve the initial ‘choice set.’ In
contrast, individualistic mindset primed participants, are
more likely to experience the two choices as separate.
Effects of a salient collectivistic mindset carry over from
the social domain to non-social reasoning in the form of a
general ‘connecting’ mental procedure. For example,
collectivistic mindset primed participants are faster at
correctly identifying compound letters made up of little
letters, a task requiring attention to wholes rather than
their parts [7,52]. They are also faster at identifying
changes in contextual objects than in focal objects
[53], less vulnerable to visual illusions that occur when
context is ignored [54], and better able to recall inciden-
tally provided information about context [7,40,55]. In
contrast, when an individualistic mindset is activated,
people are less likely to make errors in tasks that require
ignoring extraneous auditory and visual context [40] and
more likely to solve complex reasoning tasks requiring
discovering rules [23]. Importantly these effects of
primed cultural mindsets can affect processing, judg-
ments, and performance regardless of whether partici-
pants are from an individualistic society or from a
collectivistic society.
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Cultural fluency
A third core prediction of CSC is that living in a society
results in rich tacit ‘if–then’ knowledge, an array of
minutely tuned expectations about how events will un-
fold, and what a situation will be about [56]. An expec-
tation-observation match is experienced as ‘culturally
fluent.’ This cultural fluency implies that the world is a
predictable place, with things as they ought to be. In
contrast, an expectation-observation mismatch is experi-
enced as disfluent and implies that things might not be as
assumed; this requires ramped up attention and system-
atic reasoning to figure out whether something is wrong.
Whereas an experience of cultural fluency implies that
one can keep going, cultural disfluency implies that one
should stop and reconsider one’s course. These experi-
ences influence judgment and behavior even when they
are incidental as indicated by their influence on unrelated
tasks [56], judgments [57] and feelings [58].
For example, participants were found to put more food on
their plates in a Chinese buffet if given plates with the
right design for Chinese New Year rather than a neutral
design if it was in fact Chinese New Year and if they were
Chinese [56]. If it was not Chinese New Year or if
participants did not know about this holiday, there was no
fluency, and hence no effect. Cultural fluency was also
found to influence reasoning. Participants were more
likely to use a spontaneous gist response after a culturally
fluent experience. In contrast, they were more likely to
use a rule-based response after a culturally disfluent one
[56].
Cultural fluency also should influence experienced inher-
ence, that is, the feeling that how things are as they ought
to be. A number of studies support this prediction, finding
that people’s endorsement of the idea that things are as
they ought to be — that the color of money is the right
color, that traffic signs have their shapes and colors for a
reason, and so on — is higher after a culturally fluent
experience [57]. People outside of their culture were
found to feel better after being reminded their own
culture [58].
Summary
Culture-as-situated cognition theory builds on situated
cognition theories and uses an experimental approach to
document that what appear to be fixed cultural differ-
ences can be traced to differences in the accessibility of
cultural mindsets. When situations render these con-
structs accessible they come to mind and influence judg-
ment. Demonstrating that people from ostensibly
different cultures have more than their chronically acces-
sible cultural mindset available for use solves a puzzle
that arises from between-group comparison models of
culture — that as social beings we have to be sensitive
to situational cues, and that even minor contextual cues
can appear to shift one’s cultural mindset. These models
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Culture-as-situated-cognition Oyserman 97
seemed to mistakenly imply that adaptations to group
living were not represented in each culture. The core
adaptations to group living can be seen as cultural mind-
sets that are available, though not necessarily always
accessible in working memory. However, when cultural
mindsets become accessible they influence the things
that culture influences — what people think about, their
salient goals, and how they think. Of course, each culture
is unique and cultural expertise involves learning a richly
detailed operating code, which is not simply a cultural
mindset. Indeed, people are so expert in their own
culture’s operating code that even slight variations trigger
shift to systematic processing and increased vigilance to
ascertain if something is wrong. By using the powerful
tools provided by a social cognition approach, culture-as-
situated cognition theory provides an approach to under-
standing how culture affects human action.
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Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:94–99