LIVING IN MULTICULTURAL

WORLDSPor Rochelle Hernández

ACCULTURATION: WHAT IS IT?■Process by which people migrate to and learn

a culture that is different from their original (or heritage) culture

■ Difficult to study

What do you think happens to people’s cultural psychology when they move to a culture that is different from the one where they were raised?

MOVING TO A NEW CULTURE INVOLVES...

Psychological adjustment Aquiring a new language, learning new interpersonal and

social behaviors, adjusting one’s self concept

Key Terms Migrants Heritage culture Host culture Sojourners Immigrants

Studies Numerous done to explore migrants’ psychological

adjustment

■ Lysgaard study found a pattern in Norwegian Fulbright Scholars that came to US(1) U Shaped Curve- Honeymoon- Culture Shock - Adjustment

■ Creation of a W Shaped Curve (Gullahorn & Gullahorn, 1963)

Sverre Lysgaard U-Curve of Cultural Adjustment (1955)

(months)

SUCCESS OF ACCULTURATION

It’s thought that success of people’s acculturation experiences are influenced by the homogeneity of the society to which they are trying to acculturate

Heterogeneous cultures thought to be better Sojourner Adjustment: The Case of Foreigners in Japan

(Hsiao-Ying, 1995) US vs Japan: Japan, L shape (no adjustment) Possible that adjustment phase takes longer in

homogenous societies

What are some factors that influence how people will adjust to their acculturation experiences?

FACTORS TO CONSIDER Cultural Distance Cultural Fit Acculturation Strategies

THE FACTORS: (1) CULTURAL DISTANCE Difference between two cultures in their overall ways of life

More cultural difference someone needs to travel, more difficulty person will have in acculturating (Harder if cultures are more different)

One way to test the above hypothesis is to compare performance on various measurements of acculturation across countries

One test that’s looked at a lot is ones over language performance (i.e. the TOEFL)

Another study looked at overall cultural difference in general (Ward and Kennedy, 1995)

Distance within same country

(2) CULTURAL FIT Is the degree to which an individual’s personality is more similar to the

dominant cultural values in host culture Greater the cultural fit of a person with host culture, more easily he/she

should acculturate to it Extraversion

Silventoinen et al., 2008 Searle & Warde, 1989

(3) ACCULTURATION STRATEGIES Berry & Sam, 1997

2 issues Did people attempt to participate in host culture? Are people striving to maintain their own heritage culture and identity as

members of that culture?

DRAWBACKS TO ACCULTURATION Other’s adopting “American Lifestyle”

Geol, McCarthy, Phillips, & Wee, 2004 US eating habits

Marmot & Syme, 1976 Japanese and heart disease

Immigrants and descendents exposed to harmful discrimination

What are some of the psychological costs of being a member of a culture that is actively discriminated against by others?

DIFFERENT BUT OFTEN UNEQUAL People from diff cultures not all treated with equal respect

Happens to those who move to a new culture and to those whose ancestors are from diff cultural background

Stereotype threat African-Am & schooling Steele et al., 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTYMSulvnyw (1:03)

Coping with stress of stereotype Disidentify Avoiding

How are people’s minds different if they have lived in two distinct cultures throughout their lives?

2 MODELS ■ If people’s self-concepts and ways of thinking are

shaped by their cultural experiences, then what kind of self-concept do people have who live in more than one culture?

■Blending vs Frame Switching ■Studies on both

BLENDING People’s self-concepts reflect a hybrid of their

two cultural words Study by Heine & Lehman in 2004

Self-esteem of Japanese exchange students in Canada vs Canadian English teachers in Japan

Self-esteem of 7 levels of Japanese who never left Japan to those of Euro-descent Canadians

FRAME-SWITCHING Thought to be when bicultural people are able to switch between different cultural selves

They don’t blend or lose culture Different selves can be selectivity activated by cultral cues/contexts

Navigating language. Switch, don’t blend W.E.B. Du Bois (1903/1989)

Af-Am; two selves/thoughts/etc. Behave different in certain contexts; rules of school vs rules of street (aka “code-switching”

from “decent to street”) Conscious process

Studies Fish (Hong et al., 2000)

Brain clusters related info in networks, this is how priming works. Unconscious process Bicultural Identity Integration

Do you think multicultural people are more creative?

MULTICULTURAL PEEPS MAY BE MORE CREATIVE More than one perspective may allow you to

learn how to see the world in novel ways, fostering creativity

Ang Lee Alejandro González Iñárritu

Will Maddux and Adam Galinsky (2009) Measured creativity and identified correlations between

levels of creativity and living abroad 3 groups Primed first then asked to draw an alien

“Dimensions in Acculturation: One, Two, or Many?” (De Vijver, 2015)Says that there has been a shift on acculturation models from one- to two- to multidimensional models

Describes each models and explains strengths/weaknessesArgues that shift to two- and multidimensional models reflect complex reality of psychological acculturation and changing nature of migration in last 100 yrs

LATEST RESEARCH ON ACCULTURATION

● Lysgaard, S. (1955) Adjustment in a foreign society: Norwegian Fulbright grantees visiting the United States. International Social Science Bulletin, 7, 45-51.

● Gullahorn, J.R., & Gullahorn, J.E. (1962). An extension of the u-curve hypothesis. Journal of Social Issues, 3, 33-47.

● Oberg, K. (1960). Culture shock: Adjustment to new cultural environments. Practical Anthropology, 7, 177-182.

● Gaw, K. (2000). Reverse culture shock in students returning from overseas. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 24, 89-104.

● Maddux, W.W. & Galinsky, A.H. (2010). When in rome . . . learn why the Romans do what they do: How Multicultural Learning Experiences Facilitate Creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 731-741.

● De Vijver, F.J.R. (2015). Dimensions in Acculturation: One, Two, or Many? Psihologia Resurselor Umane, 13, 32-38.

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTYMSulvnyw ● Heine, S.J. (2012). Cultural Psychology (2nd ed). New York: Norton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY