Redefining the mainstream: A review and meta-analysis of the evolving dynamics of majority-group acculturation
Acculturation is defined as mutual change, yet for a century the field studied only how minorities adapt. Meta-analysing 37 studies with 11,024 participants, I mapped the other half: majority-group members maintain their own culture far more than they adopt others', the two orientations are largely independent — and openness to other cultures travels with intercultural sensitivity while threat pushes the other way.
The paper, in plain language
The field's missing half
In this single-authored review for the European Review of Social Psychology, I first ask why majority-group acculturation went unstudied for a century. Two interpretive answers: the field's colonial inheritance quietly framed change as something minorities do, and even well-intended equity concerns can slide into paternalism — studying minorities as subjects of help rather than everyone as agents of change. The empirical half then gathers every study that measured majority members' own cultural maintenance and adoption: 37 studies, 445 effects.
What the numbers say
Majority-group members sit near the scale midpoint on adopting other cultures while clearly maintaining their own — an 18-point gap. Crucially, the two orientations are essentially uncorrelated overall: valuing your own culture does not imply rejecting others. Context shapes even that — in settler societies like the US and Australia the orientations correlate positively, in European nation states they do not. The strongest correlates of adoption are intercultural sensitivity and welcoming diversity ideologies on the positive side, perceived threat on the negative; maintenance travels above all with national inclination.
The honest print
Heterogeneity across studies is very high, nearly everything is correlational — a limitation I call diagnostic for the entire acculturation field — and two of the five models showed signals of possible publication bias. The socio-historical argument about colonial roots is labelled in the paper for what it is: a critical reflection and thought-provoking hypothesis, not a settled empirical claim.
Why it matters
As majority-minority societies approach, the question of how majorities change stops being exotic and becomes demographic arithmetic. This review consolidates the research programme I began with Katharina Lefringhausen, David Sam and colleagues, connects it to our cultural-evolution account of how change spreads, and to the question of when majority adoption is genuine change rather than appropriation — both continued in their own papers summarized on this site.
Kunst, J.R. (2025). Redefining the Mainstream: A Review and Meta-Analysis of the Evolving Dynamics of Majority-Group Acculturation. European Review of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2025.2492506