ABSTRACT
Do brides wear green? Are animals and plants patriotic holiday-themed decorations? Being part of a culture means knowing (implicitly) what to expect in everyday situations and mostly not feeling flummoxed by what actually unfolds. This experience of cultural fluency makes daily life feel easy to process – requiring little thought. In contrast, cultural disfluency arises in situations in which observation mismatches prediction. Mismatch is a problem signal that elicits more deliberate thought and systematic reasoning to figure out what went awry. Because people are sensitive to their experiences of ease but not necessarily to the source of their experiences, ease arising from cultural fluency can be misattributed to unrelated judgment tasks, increasing credulity and gullibility. Indeed, research on people from the United States, China, and Israel suggests that their mindlessness and gullibility are reduced and their reasoning improved after exposure to irrelevant cultural disfluency (e.g., photographs of brides wearing the “wrong” colored gown, plates with the “wrong” patterns).
