People are less likely to recognize disinformation if it is given in a culturally fluent manner because they are less likely to feel suspicious, sense something is amiss, and move to systematic reasoning in these cases.

Conclusion of Bruner and Postman Shape Study

- Bruner and Postman (1949) asked American college students to recognize shapes (hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades) that had mismatched colors (i.e. a red spade)
- They noted that the students were slower to recognize these mismatched shapes than the shapes that were their "normal" color (i.e. a “black” spade) because they applied their culture-based knowledge automatically

Johns Hopkins University

Certain information, that is often implicit, regarding how things work within a specific culture. From our expectations of how a bride should dress for their wedding or what one should eat for breakfast, cultural knowledge networks help us determine what is expected to come next in a situation. 

Cultural Knowledge Networks

Oyserman, D., & Dawson, A. (2020). Your fake news, our facts: Identity-based motivation shapes what we believe, share, and accept. In R. Greifeneder, M. Jaffé, E. J. New- man, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), The psychology of fake news: Accepting, sharing, and correcting misinformation (pp. 173–195). London: Routledge. 

Your fake news, our facts: Identity-based motivation shapes what we believe, share, and accept

Bruner and Postman Shape Study

- Mourey, Lam, and Oyserman (2015) conducted a series of experiments in which participants were either exposed to a “culturally fluent” or “culturally disfluent” situation or product while performing a task
- For example, in one experiment, people were randomly assigned to one of four groups; one of the groups was the “culturally fluent” one in which participants were asked to do a task on Valentine’s Day on a screen that displayed a pink-colored border. The other groups either did the task on Valentine’s day without a pink border, or did the task a week after Valentine's day with or without a pink border

Mourey, Lam, and Oyserman Study

Through using cultural knowledge, people, upon realizing that something is not right or does not align with their own personal cultural knowledge network, begin to switch from using an associative, gut-based reasoning to systematic, rule-based reasoning to approach an unexpected situation. 

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