Cultural psychology
Chapter 7
Living in multicultural worlds

Difficulties in studying acculturation

Acculturation is the process by which people migrate to and learn a culture that is different from their original (or heritage) culture.

Reaching consistent conclusions on acculturation is difficult because acculturating individuals have widely varying experiences. 1) People move to a new country for many reasons. 2) Acculturating individuals can move to dramatically different kinds of environments. 3) People move to cultures that vary in their similarity to their heritage culture. 4) Different individuals have different personalities, goals, and expectations that affect their acculturation experiences.

What happens when people move to a new culture?

Moving to a new culture involves psychological adjustment. This adjustment occurs over a wide variety of domains: learning a new language, learning new interpersonal and social behaviours, becoming accustomed to new values,  becoming a member of a minority group and adjusting one’s self-concept.

Changes in attitudes toward the host culture

Migrants are those who move from a heritage culture (their original culture) to a host culture (their new culture). This group includes sojourners (those who intend to stay only temporary), and immigrants (those who intend to move permanently).

A common pattern of adjustment to acculturation is a U-shaped curve. In the first few months people often have very positive feelings about the host culture, this is the honeymoon stage. Over time this gives way to the negative feelings associated with culture shock. The thrill of having novel and exotic experiences wears off and these experiences become tiring and difficult. In this stage, homesickness can become quite strong. Culture shock is the feeling of being anxious, helpless, irritable, and in general, homesick that one experiences on moving to a new culture. With time, people adjust to their new host culture and often develop positive feelings about it. This is the adjustment phase.

Sojourners can go through the same adjustment stages after they return to their home country.

This U-shaped curve does not characterize the adjustment pattern of everyone’s experiences.

Once societal feature of a host culture that seems to influence the acculturating individual’s adjustment is the ease with which migrants can be accommodated by the host culture. It is possible that in homogenous societies the adjustment phase takes longer.

Who adjusts better?

 People tend to respond differently to the myriad challenges posted by acculturation, depending on the situation that they are in and their temperament.

Cultural distance

In acculturation, people have to learn the lifestyles of a new  culture. How successful they will be in acquiring the necessary information to thrive in a new culture is influenced by how much learning they need to do.

Cultural distance is the difference between two cultures in their overall ways of life. The more cultural distance someone needs to travel, the more difficulty that person will have acculturating.

Cultural distance seems to make it difficult to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships with members of the host culture.

Cultural fit

Cultural fit is the degree to which an individual’s personality is more similar to the dominant cultural values in the host culture. The greater the cultural fit of a person with the host culture, the more easily he or she should acculturate to it. Acculturation is more straightforward if one’s sense of self fits well with one’s host cultural environment.

Acculturation strategies

Two issues are critical to the outcome of one’s acculturation are: 1) Whether people attempt to participate in the larger society of their host culture, how motivated people are to acquire an identity consistent with that of the host culture 2) Whether people are striving to maintain their own heritage culture and identity as members of that culture.

These two issues lead to distinct strategies that are proposed to influence the likelihood that one will experience psychological stress in the acculturation process. These two are independent.

There are four different acculturation strategies that people might have: 1) Integration, involves attempts to fit in and fully participate in the host culture while at the same time striving to maintain the traditions of one’s heritage culture. People have positive views about both their heritage and their host culture, they are seeking the best of both 2) Marginalization, involves little or no effort to participate in the host culture or to maintain the traditions of the heritage culture. People have negative views about both their heritage culture and their host culture 3) Assimilation, involves an attempt to fir in and fully participate in the host culture while making little or no effort to maintain the traditions of one’s heritage culture. People have positive attitudes about the host culture and negative attitudes about the heritage culture 4) Separation, involves efforts to maintain the traditions of the heritage culture while making little or no effort to participate in the host culture. People have positive attitudes toward the heritage culture and negative attitudes toward the host culture.
The most common strategy is the integration strategy, and the least common marginalization.

A variety of factors influence which strategy a migrant is likely to pursue: 1) A person will not strive to fit into the host culture if that culture shows a good deal of prejudice toward the individual’s own cultural group 2) People who have physical features that distinguish them from the majority of those in their host culture will likely experience more prejudice. More physically distinct ethnic groups are more likely to maintain negative attitudes toward the host culture and pursue separation or marginalization. 3) The extent to which majority members of the host culture value cultural diversity and tolerance of cultural differences predicts the amount of prejudice that immigrants experience.

Integration strategy is hypothesised to result in the lowest degree of acculturative stress. It incorporates more protective features.

The least successful is marginalization.

Some pitfalls of acculturation

Not all cultural habits picked up along the way are inherently desirable. Like American eating habits.

Different but often unequal

People from different cultures are not all treated with equal respect. Prejudice and discrimination have always been rampant, particularly within countries where people of different ethnic backgrounds interact.

One way that discrimination can affect acculturation experiences is evident in how majority members of a culture often view minority members. Identify denial means that an individual’s cultural identity is called into question because he or she doesn’t seem to match the prototype of the culture. This is typically a frustrating and demoralizing experience.

The consequences of discrimination can be far-reaching. Stereotype threat is the fear that one might do something that will inadvertently confirm a negative stereotype about one’s group. It is not necessary to belief a stereotype to be aware of it. When people experience stereotype threat they often end up acting in ways that are precisely consistent with the stereotype, and their behaviour ends up proving it. Because ethnic minorities so often receive the brunt of negative stereotypes around the world, they are at risk for stereotype threat and proving the stereotypes.

Sometimes the effect of stereotype threat can be elicited by what may seem to be positive reminders of a stereotype.

The existence of stereotype threat can make the acculturation process of disadvantaged minorities difficult. People may begin to cope with the stress of stereotype threat by disidentifying with the stereotyped domain and adopting strategies to avoid reminders of the stereotype, thus perpetuating the stereotype.

Being from a distinctive group can have psychological benefits. People with a distinctive cultural background are more likely to come to strongly identify with their group and to increase their loyalty toward it. Their distinctive group membership becomes an important source of meaning and self-esteem in their lives. The stronger sense of group identification that people from distinctive cultural backgrounds possess can create many positive feelings about both the individual and the group. These appear to serve an important function for coping with discrimination.

Multicultural people

Blending is the tendency for bicultural people to evince psychological tendencies between those of their two cultures.

Frame-switching (or alternation) is the tendency for bicultural people to switch between different cultural selves.

Evidence for blending

People are exposed to novel cultural information when they move to a new culture. This exposure seems to affect the self-concept rather quickly.

Acculturative changes in the self-concept extent across a long period of time.

Evidence for frame-switching

Multicultural people can develop multiple selves, each equipped to deal with specific cultural environments. According to the frame-switching theory, multicultural people develop mastery over both cultural worlds and develop divergent selves that can be selectively activated by different cultural contexts.

Like bilinguals.

Culture is represented in the brain as a network of specific information. Activating one construct that is part of a network should activate the other constructs of the network. This makes people primed to one part of an information network, which influences behaviour. People have multiple networks for the different cultures in which they belong.

People unconsciously end up thinking in ways consistent with the cultural prime.

Not all biculturals frame-switch to the same degree. Bicultural identity integration is the extent to which people see their two cultural identities as compatible or in opposition to each other. The greatest frame-switching occurs among those who are high in bicultural identity integration. These people can fluidly react to external cues in culturally consistent ways. People in low bicultural identity integration tend to see their cultural identities in opposition to each other.

Bilingual people tend to frame-switch when they shift between their languages. The language that people speak activates an associated cultural network, and this influences who people think.

Bicultural people are not only ones that have access to multiple knowledge structures. Even monocultural people can be primed to think in ways that are more similar to other cultures to that extent that those ways of thinking are sometimes present in their own minds.

Because biculturals often live in two distinct cultural worlds, it is likely that there would be a clearer division between their two views of self. Monoculturals might have relatively looser knowledge networks and thereby would react relatively less consistently to primes they might encounter. Biculturals frame-shift more strongly.

Multicultural people may be more creative

One key feature of creative insight is that people come to see something from a new and different perspective. Adjusting to life in another culture might provide the perspective that allows people to see things differently. Adjusting to life in a new culture is likely to provide one with an additional perspective.

One reason multiculrual experiences foster creative thinking is that living in different cultures fosters integrative complexity. This is a willingness and ability to acknowledge and consider different viewpoints on the same issue.

Creative people are also more interested in moving and adjusting to new cultures.