Cesario questions the role of experimental social-psychological bias research, suggesting that experiment-based bias research focuses only on social category membership, missing the context-specific interactions and features of persons that dominate decision-making. We agree with much of Cesario's concern, though not necessarily his conclusions. Here, we elaborate on our disagreement and suggest a particular path forward – experiments highlighting the roles cultural fluency and disfluency play in both bias emergence/maintenance and as obstacles to bias correction and anti-racism.
Social psychologists assume that people respond to situations as they construe them. Hence, social-psychologically grounded experiments focus on illuminating and understanding these construals. Experiments allow for clear tests of how construal affects what people do by maximizing researcher certainty about what people have on their minds in a situation. However, experiments do not randomly draw situations or behaviors from the population of all the situations/behaviors occurring in the real world. Instead, experiments set up a particular situation which people are likely to understand in a particular way. They test whether people put in that situation respond differently from people put in a psychologically distinct one. Lab-based experiments can test whether a specific construal process could be occurring by setting up situations in which people are likely to reach the same construal. They cannot test whether these construal processes typically occur or the relative size of the effect of tested construal processes outside the lab.
Cesario's target paper highlights these as limits to applying lab-based bias research to policy and intervention. We agree but disagree with the conclusion that experiments cannot be helpful. What is missing from the experiments Cesario critiques is a theoretical framework bridging to the real world.
We propose culture-as-situated-cognition theory as that bridge. Culture-as-situated-cognition theory (Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Scott and Kosslyn2015) is a social-psychological theory of what culture is for and how it works. It predicts that living in a society yields cultural expertise in the form of culture-based knowledge residing in memory as associative knowledge networks. People automatically use that subset of their available culture-based knowledge accessible in the moment of judgment to make implicit predictions about what will happen next. When observations (e.g., a mournful obituary) seem to match culture-based expectations, they preserve people's sense that the world is as expected (so no thinking is needed), preserving cognitive resources (Oyserman & Yan, Reference Oyserman, Yan, Kitayama and Cohen2018; Oyserman, Novin, Flinkenflögel, & Krabbendam, Reference Oyserman, Novin, Flinkenflögel and Krabbendam2014). After experiencing culturally fluent situations, people are more likely to accept the world-as-it-is and consequently see cultural groups as having more permanent, essential differences (Lin, Arieli, & Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Baumeister and Forgas2019).
In contrast, people engage more carefully and process more deeply when their observations mismatch culture-based expectations. Mismatches (e.g., a delighted obituary) yield a metacognitive experience of disfluency, which signals that something is wrong without clarifying what precisely is wrong (Oyserman et al., Reference Oyserman, Novin, Flinkenflögel and Krabbendam2014). Cultural (dis)fluency has consequences. People are less likely to use rule-based reasoning after experiencing culturally fluent rather than disfluent cues (Mourey, Lam, & Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Scott and Kosslyn2015).
Experiments using a culture-as-situated-cognition approach can allow researchers to make progress in two ways. First, they pinpoint the easy-to-process features of the situation that match people's expectations. Second, they illuminate the consequence of experiencing expectation-observation mismatches (Oyserman, Reference Oyserman2011, Reference Oyserman2017). Each is a place that researchers should look for possible bias effects. By manipulating cultural fluency and studying what happens in culturally disfluent situations, researchers can unpack how cultural fluency works to shape and maintain bias and why correction and anti-bias are so non-obvious.
In the case of race-based stereotypical responses, people's culture-based associative knowledge networks include representations of how situations involving people from specific groups will likely unfold. These automatic predictions include appraisals (e.g., competence and trustworthiness), content-specific beliefs (stereotypes), emotions (prejudices), and behavioral responses (discriminatory tendencies, Dovidio & Fiske, Reference Dovidio and Fiske2012). These culture-based expectations shape how people construe their immediate situation. The reverse is also true. Group-based disparities rooted in discriminatory legislation/policies (e.g., red-lining and segregation) and differential resource access and control can create culture-based stereotypes about group features. People experience these disparities as culturally fluent group-based features people and use them to automatically predict how interactions will unfold when they anticipate interacting with people they expect to be from these groups. These culture-based expectations shape what people are likely to pay attention to in their interactions and whether they will stick to gut-based processing even if rule-based processing is needed. Moreover, even if people notice a mismatch between their culture-based expectation and the situation, people are unlikely to infer that bias is the problem. That is because mismatch only works to alert people that something is wrong, not what that might be (Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Baumeister and Forgas2019). Alertness increases vigilance and suspicion but does not pinpoint what the problem is; bias itself is not automatically revealed or changed. Change occurs only with targeted intervention.
As Cesario notes, in more naturalistic settings, decision-makers may attribute their actions to features of the situation or interaction. They see the specifics. This makes it difficult to conclude that race-based biases play a role. A culture-as-situated-cognition perspective highlights that the taken-for-granted version of reality entails culture-based biased expectations. Culture-based expectations matter even though people are unlikely to notice them. Experiments are critical in shedding light on the possibility of bias because bias hides in culturally fluent blind spots. Only experiments can document that a bias might matter and how it might matter. Intervention and policy researchers need lab-based experiments that illuminate what is culturally fluent when people interact within and across divides, which features of situations preserve and which disrupt cultural fluency, and with what consequences.
Other designs are needed to address the questions of when, how often, and how much bias matters. Researchers can use ecological-momentary assessment to learn when (Newman & Stone, Reference Newman, Stone, Kardes, Herr and Schwarz2019) and diary studies to learn how often (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, Reference Bolger, Davis and Rafaeli2003). They can meld these with daily reconstruction methods to learn how much bias matters in real-world situations (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, Reference Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz and Stone2004). To gain an estimate of effect sizes, they may turn to simulations using each of the inputs gained from the prior methods. Of course, social-psychological experiments cannot encapsulate every step of this process; that is not their purpose. However, experimental studies offer a crucial step in understanding and tackling real-world disparities by shedding light on culturally fluent blind spots. Progress in understanding bias requires taking cultural fluency seriously.
Cesario questions the role of experimental social-psychological bias research, suggesting that experiment-based bias research focuses only on social category membership, missing the context-specific interactions and features of persons that dominate decision-making. We agree with much of Cesario's concern, though not necessarily his conclusions. Here, we elaborate on our disagreement and suggest a particular path forward – experiments highlighting the roles cultural fluency and disfluency play in both bias emergence/maintenance and as obstacles to bias correction and anti-racism.
Social psychologists assume that people respond to situations as they construe them. Hence, social-psychologically grounded experiments focus on illuminating and understanding these construals. Experiments allow for clear tests of how construal affects what people do by maximizing researcher certainty about what people have on their minds in a situation. However, experiments do not randomly draw situations or behaviors from the population of all the situations/behaviors occurring in the real world. Instead, experiments set up a particular situation which people are likely to understand in a particular way. They test whether people put in that situation respond differently from people put in a psychologically distinct one. Lab-based experiments can test whether a specific construal process could be occurring by setting up situations in which people are likely to reach the same construal. They cannot test whether these construal processes typically occur or the relative size of the effect of tested construal processes outside the lab.
Cesario's target paper highlights these as limits to applying lab-based bias research to policy and intervention. We agree but disagree with the conclusion that experiments cannot be helpful. What is missing from the experiments Cesario critiques is a theoretical framework bridging to the real world.
We propose culture-as-situated-cognition theory as that bridge. Culture-as-situated-cognition theory (Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Scott and Kosslyn2015) is a social-psychological theory of what culture is for and how it works. It predicts that living in a society yields cultural expertise in the form of culture-based knowledge residing in memory as associative knowledge networks. People automatically use that subset of their available culture-based knowledge accessible in the moment of judgment to make implicit predictions about what will happen next. When observations (e.g., a mournful obituary) seem to match culture-based expectations, they preserve people's sense that the world is as expected (so no thinking is needed), preserving cognitive resources (Oyserman & Yan, Reference Oyserman, Yan, Kitayama and Cohen2018; Oyserman, Novin, Flinkenflögel, & Krabbendam, Reference Oyserman, Novin, Flinkenflögel and Krabbendam2014). After experiencing culturally fluent situations, people are more likely to accept the world-as-it-is and consequently see cultural groups as having more permanent, essential differences (Lin, Arieli, & Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Baumeister and Forgas2019).
In contrast, people engage more carefully and process more deeply when their observations mismatch culture-based expectations. Mismatches (e.g., a delighted obituary) yield a metacognitive experience of disfluency, which signals that something is wrong without clarifying what precisely is wrong (Oyserman et al., Reference Oyserman, Novin, Flinkenflögel and Krabbendam2014). Cultural (dis)fluency has consequences. People are less likely to use rule-based reasoning after experiencing culturally fluent rather than disfluent cues (Mourey, Lam, & Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Scott and Kosslyn2015).
Experiments using a culture-as-situated-cognition approach can allow researchers to make progress in two ways. First, they pinpoint the easy-to-process features of the situation that match people's expectations. Second, they illuminate the consequence of experiencing expectation-observation mismatches (Oyserman, Reference Oyserman2011, Reference Oyserman2017). Each is a place that researchers should look for possible bias effects. By manipulating cultural fluency and studying what happens in culturally disfluent situations, researchers can unpack how cultural fluency works to shape and maintain bias and why correction and anti-bias are so non-obvious.
In the case of race-based stereotypical responses, people's culture-based associative knowledge networks include representations of how situations involving people from specific groups will likely unfold. These automatic predictions include appraisals (e.g., competence and trustworthiness), content-specific beliefs (stereotypes), emotions (prejudices), and behavioral responses (discriminatory tendencies, Dovidio & Fiske, Reference Dovidio and Fiske2012). These culture-based expectations shape how people construe their immediate situation. The reverse is also true. Group-based disparities rooted in discriminatory legislation/policies (e.g., red-lining and segregation) and differential resource access and control can create culture-based stereotypes about group features. People experience these disparities as culturally fluent group-based features people and use them to automatically predict how interactions will unfold when they anticipate interacting with people they expect to be from these groups. These culture-based expectations shape what people are likely to pay attention to in their interactions and whether they will stick to gut-based processing even if rule-based processing is needed. Moreover, even if people notice a mismatch between their culture-based expectation and the situation, people are unlikely to infer that bias is the problem. That is because mismatch only works to alert people that something is wrong, not what that might be (Oyserman, Reference Oyserman, Baumeister and Forgas2019). Alertness increases vigilance and suspicion but does not pinpoint what the problem is; bias itself is not automatically revealed or changed. Change occurs only with targeted intervention.
As Cesario notes, in more naturalistic settings, decision-makers may attribute their actions to features of the situation or interaction. They see the specifics. This makes it difficult to conclude that race-based biases play a role. A culture-as-situated-cognition perspective highlights that the taken-for-granted version of reality entails culture-based biased expectations. Culture-based expectations matter even though people are unlikely to notice them. Experiments are critical in shedding light on the possibility of bias because bias hides in culturally fluent blind spots. Only experiments can document that a bias might matter and how it might matter. Intervention and policy researchers need lab-based experiments that illuminate what is culturally fluent when people interact within and across divides, which features of situations preserve and which disrupt cultural fluency, and with what consequences.
Other designs are needed to address the questions of when, how often, and how much bias matters. Researchers can use ecological-momentary assessment to learn when (Newman & Stone, Reference Newman, Stone, Kardes, Herr and Schwarz2019) and diary studies to learn how often (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, Reference Bolger, Davis and Rafaeli2003). They can meld these with daily reconstruction methods to learn how much bias matters in real-world situations (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, Reference Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz and Stone2004). To gain an estimate of effect sizes, they may turn to simulations using each of the inputs gained from the prior methods. Of course, social-psychological experiments cannot encapsulate every step of this process; that is not their purpose. However, experimental studies offer a crucial step in understanding and tackling real-world disparities by shedding light on culturally fluent blind spots. Progress in understanding bias requires taking cultural fluency seriously.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors
Conflict of interest
None.