A plausible interpretation of the decline in the performance of the high-caste subjects is
that the segregation of individuals by caste status is a strong cue to the caste system, in which
social status is ascriptive. Given the sense of entitlement of the high caste under the caste order,
making caste highly salient activates a mental frame in which a high-caste person has less need
to achieve because his status is based on caste and family, not individual performance. Under the
evoked mental frame, high-caste subjects see less need to work hard. This interpretation suggests
that human preferences are not uniquely determined but leave opportunity for variation, and
slight differences in situations can cue different mental frames and lead to the expression of
different preferences. In other words, we have learned from the society in which we live a variety
of roles that can be situationally evoked, and the conditions in Hoff and Pandey’s study act as
"frame switches" that evoke different roles. An elaboration of this way of thinking about culture
is developed in two important papers in sociology, Swidler (1986) and DiMaggio (1997), which
seek to reformulate culture’s causal role in shaping action. In the old view in sociology, culture
imparts values that are consistent across situations, and the values explain action. In the new
view, culture shapes behavior not as a latent variable, but rather as sets of frames that are
situationally evoked and that determine which actions seem possible and desirable, given a
person’s values.
The study by LeBoeuf et al. explicitly investigates the hypothesis that people have multiple
identities, and that making one identity more salient than others would evoke different norms and
values. As a consequence, depending on the identity that is made salient, the subjects are
hypothesized to show different behavioural preferences. The authors conjectured, in particular,
that for Asian-American subjects, it is possible to trigger their Asian identity associated with
norms of cooperation and collectivism, or their American identity that puts less emphasis on
cooperation and more emphasis on individualistic values. Different identities are primed by a
few survey questions before the experimental task. These were questions like “Where were you
born?” or “What is your favourite Chinese (American) holiday?” After the subjects received
either the Asian or the American prime, they provided answers to questions that elicited their
cooperation preference in a hypothetical prisoners’ dilemma (PD) and their degree of
individualism in a hypothetical choice situation in a restaurant6. The Asian prime led to a much
6 Degree of individualism was elicited as follows: “You and your friends all love the same restaurant, and whenever
you go there, you each order the same thing. One day, however, the waiter mentions a new, somewhat exotic dish that