Oyserman, D. & Yan. V. X. (2018). Making meaning: a culture-as-situated cognition approach to the consequences of cultural fluency and disfluency. In S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology. NY: Guilford Press.

Figure 20.1. From predictions to meaning making and action. When predictions from the activated culturally rooted associative knowledge networks are borne out in observations, nodes in the network are strengthened, certainty in understanding the world, and experienced fluency increase—the world is as it should be. Nodes in the network are weakened and experienced uncertainty and disfluency increase when predictions mismatch observations, influencing thinking, feeling, and doing. Adapted with permission from Oyserman (2017).

Oyserman, D. & Yan. V. X. (2018). Making meaning: a culture-as-situated cognition approach to the consequences of cultural fluency and disfluency. In S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology. NY: Guilford Press.

Figure 20.2. From cues to prediction. Features, or cues, in the immediate situation (left panel) interact with cultural expertise to activate an associative knowledge network (middle panel). This activated network in turn produces a prediction (middle panel), which is then compared against the observed situation (right panel). Predictions generated from the activated associative knowledge networks may either match or mismatch the observed situation. Adapted from Oyserman (2017).

Oyserman, D. & Yan. V. X. (2018). Making meaning: a culture-as-situated cognition approach to the consequences of cultural fluency and disfluency. In S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology. NY: Guilford Press.

Figure 20.3. Example of culturally fluent (top) and disfluent (bottom) stimuli used in Mourey, Lam, and Oyserman (2015).

Oyserman, D. & Yan. V. X. (2018). Making meaning: a culture-as-situated cognition approach to the consequences of cultural fluency and disfluency. In S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology. NY: Guilford Press.

Figure 20.4. Examples of Valentine’s Day fluency manipulations used by Mourey et al. (2015; top row: manipulation of a relatively peripheral cue) and Lin et al. (under review-a; bottom row: manipulation of a more central cue). On the left are images displaying the relatively culturally fluent conditions, and on the right are images displaying the relatively culturally disfluent conditions. For the manipulation illustrated in the top row (the pink vs. the black border), the pink border yielded an experience of cultural fluency only when the experiment was conducted on Valentine’s Day; for the manipulation illustrated in the bottom row (the hearts vs. the skull patterns), the skulls yielded an experience of cultural disfluency whether or not the experiment was conducted on Valentine’s Day.

Oyserman, D. & Yan. V. X. (2018). Making meaning: a culture-as-situated cognition approach to the consequences of cultural fluency and disfluency. In S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology. NY: Guilford Press.

Figure 20.5. Left: Jewish Israeli couple holding a themed wedding (image from http://urbanbridesmag.co.il). Right: A Muslim Indian wedding (image used with permission from the bride and groom). These images may activate alternative associative knowledge networks (e.g., Victorian themes on the left, love on the right), since other cues are dominant.