Who adopts the culture of ethnic minority groups? A personality perspective on majority-group members’ acculturation
What kind of majority-group member adopts minority cultures? In 301 White Americans, openness predicted adoption and conscientiousness predicted the reverse — flipping the pattern known from immigrants, plausibly because norms tell majorities not to change. A cluster analysis found majority members sorting into the same acculturation strategies long studied in minorities.
The paper, in plain language
Turning the personality lens around
Personality had been used to explain how immigrants acculturate, never how majorities do. With Katharina Lefringhausen, Sara Skaar and Milan Obaidi, I measured the HEXACO traits of 301 White Americans alongside how much they maintain mainstream culture and adopt ethnic-minority cultures. The two orientations were nearly independent — the first hint that valuing one's own culture and embracing others' are separate dispositions.
Open adopters, conscientious abstainers
Adoption of minority cultures rose with openness — inquisitiveness in particular — and fell with conscientiousness, reversing the positive conscientiousness effect found for immigrants. Our reading: conscientious people follow prevailing norms, and prevailing norms tell minorities to adapt but majorities to stay put. Maintenance of mainstream culture travelled with emotionality and extraversion and, most strongly at facet level, with low unconventionality. Clustering revealed the classic strategies — separated, integrated, marginalized — plus a diffuse group whose profile was the most distinctive: the least conscientious, the most open.
Why it matters
As diversity rises, whether majorities meet minority cultures with curiosity or retrenchment stops being an individual quirk and becomes a societal parameter — and this brief report gave the majority-acculturation programme its first personality map. It is exploratory by design: one US sample, cross-sectional, with maintenance explained far more poorly than adoption and some facet measures resting on two items. The later meta-analytic review consolidates what replicated.
Kunst, J.R., Lefringhausen, K., Skaar, S.*, & Obaidi, M. (2021). Who adopts the culture of ethnic minority groups? A personality perspective on majority-group members’ acculturation. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 81, 20-28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.01.001