How do immigrants adapt to a new culture?
For forty years the textbook answer has been 'integration': keep your heritage culture, adopt the new one, thrive. When my colleagues and I finally put that claim to a meta-analytic test, the evidence turned out to be far thinner than its fame.
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Four strategies and one famous favourite
Acculturation research sorts what migrants do into four strategies — integrate, assimilate, separate, marginalise — and for decades the field's most cited claim has been that integration produces the best adaptation. We tested that claim across the correlational and longitudinal evidence, and the support is limited: associations are small, and the longitudinal evidence, where causation would have to show itself, is weakest of all. Heterogeneity across studies is high enough that any one-sentence summary of the field should be distrusted — including that one.
What actually predicts adaptation
If strategy choice matters less than advertised, what matters more? Our large-scale meta-analysis in Nature Communications maps the social and contextual side of the question: discrimination, social support, contact with members of the receiving society. The pattern is uncomfortable for advice-giving, because it relocates much of the outcome from the migrant's choices to the conditions the receiving society sets. Adaptation is not a solo performance; it is a transaction.
The majority changes too
The field's deeper blind spot is that it treats cultural contact as something that happens to minorities. A sustained line of my work argues that majority groups acculturate too — adopting practices, tastes and values from the minorities they live alongside — and a review and meta-analysis traces how the mainstream itself is redefined in the process. Once you see cultural change as running in both directions, 'how do immigrants adapt?' reveals itself as half a question.
A caution about causality
Most acculturation evidence is cross-sectional while the theory is thoroughly causal — a gap my colleagues and I have named directly, arguing for longitudinal and experimental designs. We have also proposed a cultural-evolution framework that treats acculturation as change in a population over time rather than a static individual profile. The full research programme is on the acculturation strand page.