Abstract
This study aims to discover how visual representations of common word sequences in language can increase or decrease a viewer’s gullibility and trust based on how well the ordering of the stimuli matches the common ordering in the viewer’s culture. My primary research question is “How does the cultural congruence of the horizontal arrangement of objects in an image with its respective language's normative binomial collocation sequences affect the viewer's processing of subsequent questions?” This paper hypothesizes that, when shown images that are in a culturally fluent arrangement, participants will be in a state of greater gullibility. Alternatively, when shown images arranged in a culturally disfluent manner, the viewer will engage in higher-level reasoning and be more skeptical. We randomly assigned participants to one of three groups – the control group, the culturally fluent group, and the culturally disfluent group. In the culturally fluent group, participants were shown visual representations of binomial collocation sequences arranged left to right, as they are commonly spoken in English. In the culturally disfluent group, participants were shown collocation sequences arranged opposite to the cultural norm. After viewing the images, participants were tested on tasks that assess intuitive vs. systematic reasoning and measure their gullibility. The data do not support our hypotheses that if the participants are shown culturally fluent visual representations of collocation sequences, then they exhibit more intuitive reasoning, and that those shown culturally disfluent stimuli exhibit more systematic reasoning, nor does it support that this change prompts more face-value acceptance of inherence in culture. The data do indicate, however, that participants prefer viewing two associated stimuli rather than individual pictures.