Culturally Fluent Theories, Metascience and Scientific Progress: A Case Example

Some ideas just feel right, others not so much. Familiar ideas are easier to process, seem to enjoy broad support, and are more likely to be accepted. Culture-based familiarity with the gist of an idea enhances the sense that things are as they ought to be. An idea’s cultural fluency reduces the likelihood that people apply systematic rule-based reasoning strategies even when these would be appropriate. People shift to more skeptical reasoning strategies when ideas are unfamiliar and do not fit culture-based assumptions. This commentary applies a cultural fluency lens and a set of metascience principles to compare the meta-analytic syntheses of growth mindset interventions by Macnamara and Burgoyne (2022) and Burnette et al. (2022). In doing so, the commentary raises more fundamental questions about the relationship between theoretical claims, their popular acceptance, and the demanded level of evidence.