HOW CULTURE SHAPES THINKING
In his engaging new book, Culture and Cognition, Wayne Brekhus takes the reader on an intriguing tour of the cultural character of cognition, offering clues about how to understand people more deeply. A couple of areas in particular caught our attention: classification mindsets and memory.
1. Classification Mindsets
People generally use three classification mindsets for ordering the world around them: rigid, fuzzy, and flexible. These vary across cultural groupings. The rigid mind primarily sees the world as fitting into strict categories, seeking to avoid disorder or impurity. Ambiguities, for this mindset, are disturbing. Such mindsets are common in orthodox communities and communities in danger of disappearing. The fuzzy mindset enjoys blending categories and is suspicious of social boundaries. The flexible mind is a blending of the two.
Learnings: Research can uncover the kinds of classification mindsets that operate around different product categories and in different cultures. These consumer mindsets can offer clues about how to evolve function and design.
2. Memory
Memory is culturally shaped so that many aspects of the past are ignored as out of frame, while a few are accentuated as salient. People highlight, eliminate, and rearrange elements to construct a narrative past that fits within their present context. Yet not all past events have equal weight. First time experiences or “jumps from zero to one” have more significance in memory than subsequent experiences.
Learnings: The new user’s experience should be carefully considered in product and service design as this first encounter could hold greater weight in recollections than subsequent use experiences.