acculturation
Definition
Acculturation refers to the psychological and behavioral changes that occur when individuals from different cultural backgrounds come into sustained contact, encompassing shifts in practices, values, and identities across domains such as family, work, and schooling. The dominant framework organizes individual responses along two dimensions, heritage cultural maintenance and engagement with the settlement society, yielding four strategies: integration, separation, assimilation, and marginalization. Meta-analytical re-examination of the integration hypothesis, long considered the most adaptive strategy, reveals that apparent integration effects are driven primarily by mainstream-culture orientation rather than any genuine interaction between the two orientations, with bivariate proxy methods explaining roughly 2% of adaptation variance while the true interaction effect approaches zero. Acculturation processes are not confined to face-to-face contact; digital technologies now constitute a distinct dimension of acculturative experience for refugees, international students, and diasporic communities, and Indigenous Peoples remain systematically underrepresented in frameworks that were built largely around voluntary immigrant populations. A genuinely developmental perspective further distinguishes between collecting longitudinal data and theorizing acculturation as a lifespan process shaped by age-specific tasks, phase transitions, and individual variation in tempo.
Sources: Vu & Bierwiaczonek (2025), Stuart et al. (2025), Ward et al. (2025), Jugert & Titzmann (2025)
Related Terms
Applications
Acculturation and Social Comparison
Social comparison processes, including interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup comparisons, shape how acculturating individuals perceive discrimination, form expectations, and adopt or revise acculturation strategies. The integration paradox exemplifies this dynamic: structurally successful, higher-educated immigrants are more likely to compare themselves with similarly educated majority members, and when that comparison reveals unfair disadvantage, they distance themselves psychologically from the host society rather than deepening their identification with it. This perceived unfairness is associated with resentment and reduced institutional trust, outcomes that standard acculturation models focused on cultural orientation alone cannot capture.
Sources: Verkuyten (2024)
Acculturation and Digital Technology
Digital technologies have broken down the physical proximity requirement that underpinned classical acculturation models, enabling migrants to maintain near-synchronous contact with heritage cultures while simultaneously accessing settlement-society information and networks. For refugees and asylum seekers, mobile phones function as safety and navigation tools during migration journeys, whereas international students use social media to build both bonding capital with co-ethnics and bridging capital with host-culture members, with outcomes for psychological adjustment depending on how that use is balanced. These patterns call for conceptualizing digitally mediated acculturation as an additional dimension that operates alongside, rather than replacing, face-to-face adaptation processes.
Sources: Stuart et al. (2025)
Acculturation and Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism as a societal condition, defined by multicultural ideology, intercultural contact among diverse groups, and supporting policies, has been theorized as a context that facilitates positive acculturation outcomes including cultural maintenance and equitable participation. Research with Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand demonstrates, however, that standard multicultural frameworks developed in immigrant contexts do not map straightforwardly onto Indigenous experiences, because they risk positioning Indigenous Peoples as one ethnic minority among many rather than recognizing their distinct political status and treaty rights. Support for multicultural arrangements among Māori is therefore conditional on those arrangements not overriding the bicultural partnership established by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, a boundary that existing acculturation models have largely failed to theorize.
Sources: Ward et al. (2025)
