Is Difficulty Mostly About Impossibility? What Difficulty Implies May Be Culturally Variant.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull
; 49(2): 309-328, 2023 02.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-34964424
Difficulty can signal low odds (impossibility) and high value (importance). We build on culture-as-situated cognition theory's description of culture-based fluency and disfluency to predict that the culturally fluent meaning of difficulty is culture-bound. For Americans, the culturally fluent understanding of ability is success-with-ease-not-effort, hence difficulty implies low odds of ability. This may disadvantage American institutions and practices-learning requires gaining competence and proficiency through effortful engagement. Indeed, Americans (Studies 1, 3-8; N = 4,141; Study 2, the corpus of English language) associate difficulty with impossibility more than importance. This tendency is not universal. Indian and Chinese cultures imply that difficulty can equally signal low odds and value. Indeed, people from India and China (Studies 9-11, N = 762) are as likely to understand difficulty as being about both. Effects are culture-based; how much people endorse difficulty-as-importance and difficulty-as-impossibility in their own lives did not affect results.
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Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Lenguaje
/
Aprendizaje
Límite:
Humans
País/Región como asunto:
Asia
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Pers Soc Psychol Bull
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Estados Unidos
Pais de publicación:
Estados Unidos