Is difficulty mostly about impossibility? What difficulty implies may be culturally variant

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) S. Casey O'Donnell, University of Southern California; Veronica Yan, The University of Texas at Austin; Chongzeng Bi, Southwest University in Chongqing; Daphna Oyserman, University of Southern California

Version: View help for Version V1

Version Title: View help for Version Title PSPB Submission

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Studies 3 to 6			06/30/2021 12:50:PM
Studies-7-to-11			06/30/2021 12:52:PM
Study-1-Syntax-Only			06/28/2021 06:03:PM

Project Citation:

O’Donnell, S. Casey, Yan, Veronica, Bi, Chongzeng , and Oyserman, Daphna. Is difficulty mostly about impossibility? What difficulty implies may be culturally variant. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-06-30. https://doi.org/10.3886/E143881V1

Project Description

Summary: Difficulty can signal low odds (impossibility) and high value (importance). For Americans, the former seems easier to grasp. We build on culture-as-situated cognition theory’s description of culture-based fluency and disfluency to predict that the culturally fluent meaning of ability in American culture is success-with-ease, not effort. The implication is that Americans understand difficulty as low odds of ability. Indeed, Americans (Studies 1, 3-8; N=4,141, and the corpus of English language, Study 2) associate difficulty with impossibility more than importance. But this tendency is not universal. The concepts of karma in Indian culture and of “eating bitter” in Chinese culture imply that difficulty equally signals low odds and value. Indeed, people from India and China (Studies 9-11, N=762) are equally likely to understand difficulty as being about both importance and impossibility, implying that they should be better equipped to learn given that learning requires gaining competence and proficiency through effortful engagement.

Funding Sources: United States Department of Education (U411C150011); John Templeton Foundation (61083)

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: interpretation of experienced difficulty; motivation; cultural fluency and disfluency; learning strategies and motivation

Geographic Coverage: United States, China, India

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V1 [2021-06-30]

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