Kunst, J.R., Lefringhausen, L., Sam, D., Berry, J. W., & Dovidio J.F. (2021). The missing side of acculturatio

The paper, in plain language

Naming the missing side

With colleagues including David Sam, John Berry and John Dovidio, I defined majority-group acculturation as the cultural and psychological changes majority members undergo through contact with immigrant and minority groups — real incorporation of minority-culture elements into one's default repertoire, not mere polite recognition. One structural difference from the immigrant case: majority members typically acculturate to several different cultures at once, not one.

What majority members actually do

Across the studies we reviewed, majority members cluster into two of the four classic strategies: integration — keeping the majority culture while adopting minority elements — and separation, keeping it while rejecting them. Assimilation and marginalization are rare. The most striking pattern is a large 'diffuse' group with no clear strategy at all; in one White American sample, more people were diffuse than integrating. Who adopts is predictable: open-mindedness, frequent and good-quality intercultural contact, and seeing immigration as enrichment rather than threat all raise adoption, while perceived threat pushes toward pure maintenance.

Why it matters

As long as acculturation is framed as the immigrant's task, integration policy addresses half the population. Our model places the individual change inside group-level dynamics — power differentials, cultural similarity — and societal ones: multicultural policies encourage mutual change, assimilationist ones suppress it. We are careful about two things: the evidence linking majority-group adoption to well-being is still thin, and adoption by the powerful can shade into cultural appropriation — a boundary my later work examines directly.