The Unbearable Lightness of “Diversity” in Understanding Cognition: A Role for Bilingualism

Cognitive Science and its allied disciplines have now accepted diversity as a core requirement for understanding human nature in its true essence. We propose here two types of diversity mindsets that reflect distinct individual-difference attributes or personality types specifically linked to bilingualism and its adaptability. We conceptualize diversity as one's past and current "immersive" strategies in any society, both as an individual and a member of a collective, with distinct practices, cognitive strategies, language behavior, and even consciousness. The two types are "broad" and "narrow," defined by a person's adaptive competence in linguistic, social, cognitive, emotional, and cultural life. In our framework, variables such as language proficiency, educational background, occupational and socioeconomic status, and ethnocultural background interact to modulate diversity mindsets. The framework predicts experimental outcomes in a wide range of tasks for individuals identified as either "broad" or "narrow" in their diversity mindset type. We draw from evolutionary psychology, cultural neuroscience, current theories of psycholinguistics, and cognitive science to argue that it is not enough to include the non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations into research designs, but it is critical to study how individuals in different cultures adapt to diversity given their own cognitive, linguistic, and social constraints. Our framework explains how people with these diversity mindsets automatically stratify themselves into distinct groups and engage in distinct cognitive processes that influences bi-multilingualism in any context.