Is difficulty mostly about impossibility? What difficulty implies may be culturally variant

Difficulty can signal low odds (impossibility) and high value (importance). For Americans, the former seems easier to grasp. We build on culture-as-situated cognition theory’s description of culture-based fluency and disfluency to predict that the culturally fluent meaning of ability in American culture is success-with-ease, not effort. The implication is that Americans understand difficulty as low odds of ability. Indeed, Americans (Studies 1, 3-8; N=4,141, and the corpus of English language, Study 2) associate difficulty with impossibility more than importance. But this tendency is not universal. The concepts of karma in Indian culture and of “eating bitter” in Chinese culture imply that difficulty equally signals low odds and value. Indeed, people from India and China (Studies 9-11, N=762) are equally likely to understand difficulty as being about both importance and impossibility, implying that they should be better equipped to learn given that learning requires gaining competence and proficiency through effortful engagement. <br>