Cultural Sentiments and Schema-Consistency Bias in Information Transmission

Abstract

The negative outcomes associated with cultural stereotypes based on race, class, and gender and related schema-consistency biases are well documented. How these biases become culturally entrenched is less well understood. In particular, previous research has neglected the role of information transmission processes in perpetuating cultural biases. In this study, I combine insights from the cultural cognition, affect control theory, and cultural transmission frameworks to examine how one form of internalized culture—fundamental cultural sentiments—affects the content of information shared in communication. I argue that individuals communicate narratives in ways that minimize deflection of internalized cultural sentiments, resulting in cultural-consistency bias. I test this proposition using a serial transmission study in which participants read and retell short stories. Results show that culturally inconsistent, high-deflection information experiences an initial boost in memorability, but consistency biases ultimately win out as information is altered to increase cultural consistency, demonstrating that deflection provides a promising measure of cultural schema-consistency. This measure is predictive of the information that individuals share in communication and changes to this information in the transmission process.

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

“…Second, people behave in ways that satisfy the semantic constraint that they observe. Participants in a story-retelling chain transmission experiment, for example, gradually eliminate information that is culturally incongruent (Hunzaker 2016). This tendency for cognitive consistency appears to explain macro behavioral trends as well.…”

Social transmission and shared reality in cultural dynamics

“…Hunzaker [27] Deflection of information is the extent to which the information is felt to be strange and incongruous given the culturally shared affective meaning about the topic of the communication. The paper shows how to measure deflection, and provides evidence that people attempt to reduce deflection in retelling a cultural narrative, thereby contributing to cultural maintenance.…”

“…If cultural information spreads beyond dyads (mass media and other communication channels can play a significant role here) and its members have a mutual sense of shared reality about it within the population (collective shared reality), this information enters into the collective common ground (i.e., information that people in a population take for granted as shared within the population). Information that is congruent with the common ground tends to be preferentially selected for further communication even if equally good or even better quality alternatives are available [17,[23][24][25][26][27]. For instance, Fast and colleagues [23] demonstrated that when senders were tasked to initiate a conversation about baseball, they showed a strong preference towards choosing well-known but underperforming players as a topic of their conversation over lesser known players whose recent performance was outstanding.…”

Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences

“…Homan, Valentino, and Weed 2007; Beyerlain and Vaisey 2013;Vaisey 2009), but this is primarily an act of interpretation. What we often have when we want to talk about a "schema" is a conventional survey item or set of items that we choose to interpret in a specific way, rather than a concept that is precisely defined or adequately measured (see Hunzaker 2016).…”