Consequences of Cultural Fluency

On the 4th of July, do Americans put more food on a patriotic plate? Can subtle exposure to traditional wedding photos make you more willing to buy an unrelated consumer product? In short, can cultural meanings deeply rooted in memory influence consumption when cued? Culture is a meaning-making framework; the characteristic way humans perceive their environment (Triandis, 1972). In this sense, culture provides a blueprint or outline for how one is to behave and what one can expect of others across a variety of situations. What is culturally appropriate seems right, while what is culturally inappropriate seems off or wrong (Triandis, 2007). Because all of human life occurs within culture, and cultural knowledge is deeply rooted in memory, what feels right or wrong ‘goes without saying’. While social scientists have long studied culture, the implications of this feeling of fluency, the telltale marker that culture is at work, has not yet been studied directly. Instead, researchers have either focused on describing a particular culture or on comparing and distinguishing between cultures, particularly contrasting East and West and describing the content and consequences of cultural ‘syndromes’ such as individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). Rather than focusing on a specific culture or on specific differences between cultures, we introduced the concept of “cultural fluency” and focus on the consequences of the feeling of fluency that being immersed in a culture provides. Within situations that are culturally appropriate, people from that culture can feel at ease, they know what to expect and how the situation will unfold. These feelings of ease can spill over into unrelated judgments, including, as we show here, consumer judgments. We build from two major tenants of behavioral decision research and social cognition research: first, that preferences are constructed in the process of making a choice (Novemsky, Dhar, Schwarz, & Simonson, 2007) and second, that metacognitive judgment, the feelings that emerge while thinking, are a major source of constructed preferences (Schwarz & Clore, 1996). These prior studies have focused on feelings of ease or difficulty that come to mind in the process of choosing or judging. For example, they show that difficult to read print font (Song & Schwarz, 2008b) or being required to give many examples both cue feelings of difficulty that spill over into the judgment task. Building on this prior work, in five studies we provide evidence that subtle cultural cues influence consumption such that cues congruent with deeply-rooted cultural memory “feel right,” create a sense of fluency, and encourage more consumption while culturally-incongruent cues “feel wrong,” create a sense of disfluency, and discourage consumption. However, we also show that this experience of cultural fluency can influence cognitive processing style, encouraging more analytic, systematic processing when experiencing cultural disfluency and more gut, intuitive processing when experiencing cultural fluency.