- 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

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. 

Gut-based Reasoning vs. Systematic Reasoning

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. 

Saint Louis University

A collection of human behaviors and social norms that connect a group of people. These norms can include shared art, law, and beliefs, as well as other mutual commonalities.

Culture as a Sociological Issue

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

Cultural Knowledge Networks

Connected child nodes contain references for culture.

References for Culture

Prejudice common enough in a group that its consequences take place on a more or less uniform societal level. Typically these views are informed by a society's culture.

Societal Prejudice 

A theory which states that there are different levels of the effect of culture. Those levels are the universal level, the societal level, the situational level, and the individual level.

Culture-as-Situated-Cognition (CSC) Theory

A smaller subgroup developed from an original culture that are unified by a set of traits that simultaneously differentiate them from the original cultural group.

Subculture

Cultural competence in mental health refers to a therapist's ability to effectively work with clients from diverse cultural backgrounds. With a growing number of ethnically diverse individuals, it is crucial for mental health professionals to develop the knowledge and skills to address issues related to a patient's race, culture, and ethnicity. This involves approaching the therapeutic process from the context of each client's unique culture, as standard Eurocentric approaches may not be universally effective.

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