Evidence for a Cultural Mindset: Combining Process Data, Theory, and Simulation

The goal of the present work is to build a foundation for understanding cognition and decision-making processes in innovative assessment contexts. Specifically, we will assess students’ Cross-Cultural Competence (3C: see Thomas et al., 2008) through a social simulation game. The present work will use Mindset (i.e., individuals beliefs about whether ability is fixed or changeable, see Dweck, 2006) to ground the project in theory because it has been shown to be a powerful motivator for decision-making and behavior in learning and achievement (Dweck & Leggett; 1988; Dweck, 1999), and in cross-cultural contexts (Dweck, 2012). The novel contribution of this paper is to apply Mindset theory to social situations requiring 3C, thus proposing the notion of cultural mindsets—defined here as the set of beliefs including affect, cognition, and behavior people bring to cross-cultural contexts. In cultural mindset, affect and cognition govern the ease with which people adapt, learn, and update cultural information. Additionally, we argue that cultural mindsets are important mechanisms involved in navigating cross-cultural situations effectively and should be considered more in future research. In order to understand how cultural mindset affects student performance, we will apply a computational cognitive modeling approach using Markov decision process (MDP) models. The MDP approach is appropriate for sequential decision-making in non-deterministic environments—as actions are chosen as part of a plan to achieve goals with the knowledge that some action effects will be probabilistic.