Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation

The paper, in plain language

A field that plateaued

Acculturation psychology has saturated its methods, watched its central integration hypothesis weaken under meta-analytic scrutiny, largely ignored majority-group change, and left the mechanisms of 'retention' and 'adoption' unspecified. In this theory piece for Personality and Social Psychology Review, Alex Mesoudi and I import the machinery of cultural evolution — the field that treats cultural change as an evolutionary process — to supply what is missing.

Strategies as equilibria

The core move is to treat integration, separation, assimilation and marginalization not as primitives but as outcomes of five mechanisms: conformist copying of the locally common, anti-conformist resistance to it, copying what pays, copying the prestigious, and transmission from parents. A simple formal model in the paper makes one point vivid: only disproportionate conformity — not neutral copying — preserves cultural differences between groups, and the same force can drive minority traits to extinction. The framework applies symmetrically to majority-group members, whose integration should emerge where diversity is salient, rewarded, or modelled by prestigious figures.

Why it matters

Mechanisms are what make predictions testable: the paper lays out an agenda from agent-based models to experiments manipulating payoff and prestige. We are candid that the equilibrium language is informal, that observed strategies reflect constraint as much as preference — discrimination can bar the integration someone wants — and, in an explicit positionality statement, that we theorize from outside the disadvantaged-migrant experience. The paper bridges my acculturation strand to the evolutionary human sciences, and underpins the majority-acculturation programme reviewed elsewhere on this site.