科学美国人60秒:Cultural Goofs Gear Up Gray Matter

Exposure to the unusual, the jarring, the culturally shocking may be beneficial for your cognitive reasoning—and your waistline.

That’s according to a study in the journal Social Cognition. [James A. Mourey, Ben C. P. Lam and Daphna Oyserman, Consequences of Cultural Fluency]

Using events we all have some understanding of—holidays, weddings and funerals—researchers ran eight experiments to see how people respond to normative cultural situations versus culturally disfluent situations.

A normative situation would be a bride wearing white on her wedding day. A disfluent one would be hanging St. Patrick’s Day decorations on Christmas.

The first two experiments took place during Fourth of July and Labor Day picnics. For the July Fourth party, white plates were randomly mixed into stacks of stars-and-stripes plates. On Labor Day, Halloween-adorned plates were mixed in with patriotic plates.  Then guests selected food from a buffet line.

The result? On Labor Day, guests put less food on the Halloween-themed than on the patriotic plates. And on the Fourth of July, they put less food on plain white plates than on stars-and-stripes plates.  

In other parts of this study researchers found that people who have been exposed to culturally-disfluent situations performed better on cognitive reasoning tests and were less likely to succumb to impulse purchases and food consumption. That situation was compared to when events met their expectations—such as seeing hearts on Valentine’s Day.

Encountering the expected allowed subjects to behave more mindlessly.  So, researchers reason that cultural fluency preserves associative reasoning while cultural disfluency shifts to systematic reasoning. These small tests reinforce the idea that routine makes the brain dull—while the unexpected keeps it fired up.

—Erika Beras

(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)