Acculturation is the process of psychological and cultural change that happens when people from one culture come into sustained contact with a different culture, most often through migration.
It can happen at an individual level, such as when someone moves to a new country and gradually adopts its customs. It can also happen at a group level, such as when colonization brings two cultures into prolonged contact (Berry, 2008).
Key Points
- Definition: Acculturation is when groups or individuals adjust their social and cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors to match a different culture they have had sustained contact with.
- What Changes: Acculturation usually involves changes in language, dress, food, and other visible parts of culture, alongside shifts in behavior and identity.
- Outcomes: Acculturation can be positive, building understanding and tolerance, or negative, contributing to prejudice and discrimination.
- Berry’s Four Strategies: Berry proposed four modes of acculturation: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization.
- Two-Way Process: Contact can change the minority culture, the majority culture, or both, and it happens at both an individual and a group level (Berry, 2008).
Berry’s Acculturation Model
There have been more than 100 different theories of acculturation developed by academic researchers across fields. Berry’s model of acculturation has been widely used to understand the acculturation experiences of immigrants and minority groups.
Where Berry’s Model Came From
Acculturation was first defined systematically by anthropologists, not psychologists. Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits (1936) described it as what happens when groups with different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact. Either or both of the original cultures can change as a result.
For decades afterward, researchers assumed one outcome was inevitable: the minority group absorbed into the majority. Sociologist Milton Gordon (1964) formalized this as classical assimilation theory.
Gordon described a multi-stage process: cultural assimilation first, then structural, then marital and civic assimilation. It ended in the loss of a distinct ethnic identity.
By the 1970s and 1980s, John Berry challenged this assumption. Becoming like the host culture was not, he argued, either inevitable or the only healthy outcome.
Berry’s key move was to stop treating heritage-culture maintenance and host-culture adoption as two ends of one scale. He treated them as two independent dimensions instead. That reframing turned a single yes/no outcome into a broader typology. Four strategies emerged as a result (Berry, 1997, 2005).
Berry’s model of acculturation categorizes individual adaptation strategies across two dimensions.
The first dimension is the degree of maintenance or change in one’s own culture. A question under this dimension would include whether it is considered to be of value to maintain one’s identity and characteristics.
The second dimension is involvement in the host culture. It asks whether it is considered valuable to maintain relationships with the larger, new society (Berry, 1992).
The model delineates four ideal strategies for acculturation: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization.
Assimilation
Assimilation is when individuals or groups adopt the dominant culture to the exclusion of their own, often resulting in loss of cultural identity.
Individuals who acculturate often see the dominant culture as superior to their own and view assimilation as a way to improve their social and economic status. In forced acculturation situations, assimilation is often the only option for survival (Berry, 1992).
Integration
Integration is the maintenance of one’s own culture while also participating in the dominant culture. This works best when the dominant culture accepts cultural diversity.
Individuals who integrate keep a strong sense of identity with their own culture. They also participate fully in the dominant culture.
For example, many lighter-skinned immigrant groups in the United States were able to integrate more easily into mainstream society because they “passed” as white.
Irish immigrants were not considered “white enough” when they arrived in the United States in the 19th century. That changed with time. Their descendants still rose to the higher echelons of American society, eventually amassing wealth and even becoming president.
Simultaneously, the religious and cultural practices of Irish immigrants — such as Catholicism and St. Patrick’s Day — has become embedded in American culture (Berry, 1992).
Separation
Separation is the rejection of the dominant culture and preservation of one’s own cultural identity.
In this quadrant, individuals maintain their own cultural values and traditions while keeping a distance from the host culture. They may view the dominant culture as a threat to their own cultural values and traditions.
For example, in some communities, Hasidic Orthodox Jews have chosen to separate themselves from the larger society to maintain their religious and cultural traditions.
They live in insular communities, often separated by the lines of a neighborhood, dress conservatively, and follow different social customs than those of their mainstream cultural counterparts (Berry, 1992).
Marginalization
Marginalization, finally, is characterized by powerlessness and isolation from both the dominant and home cultures. Here, the individual disengages from both the individual’s own culture and the dominant culture.
This often occurs when individuals feel they do not belong to either culture. Marginalized individuals may experience poverty, unemployment, and poor mental health.
Acculturation research has found that integration tends to lead to the most favorable psychological outcomes, while marginalization leads to the least (Berry, 2005).
Regardless, researchers have criticized Berry’s acculturation model for having a lack of predictive validity.
A person’s acculturation category is not fixed. Situational factors can shape which strategy is available to someone, and which one they choose. These include who a person migrates with, their prior familiarity with the host language, and the surrounding environment (Zhou, 1997).
How Does Acculturation Work At A Group Level?
When acculturation spreads to entire groups, the widespread adoption of the values, practices, forms of art, and technologies of another culture.
This can happen when groups are in close contact with each other, such as when one group moves into the territory of another.
It can also happen when there is a large-scale movement of people from one place to another, as happened during colonization (Berry, 2008).
Acculturation can lead to changes at the political, cultural, biological, and physical levels. Politically, it can lead to changes in the way that power is distributed among different groups.
Often, these divisions can fall upon racial and ethnic lines. For example, the colonization of central and South America from the 1600s on led to the mixing of European, indigenous, and African populations. With this came the emergence of various racial categories, such as “mulatto” and “mestizo”.
Because the European culture dominated, people from these different racial groups were ascribed varying amounts of rights and privileges.
Generally, lighter-skinned people were given higher status. This lead to cultural and economic divides that still drive inequality today.
Culturally, acculturation can lead to changes in language use, family structure, and gender roles.
The arrival of Westerners in Japan and South Korea brought tremendous economic influence after the Second World War. The shift was rapid. It spread the English language and shifted cultural values, from collectivist, family-based norms toward more individualistic, achievement-oriented ones.
In some cases, it can also lead to changes in religious beliefs and practices. Christian missionaries, for example, have spread Abrahamic beliefs to areas far-flung from where the religion originated, such as the Philippines (Berry, 2008).
How Does Acculturation Work At An Individual Level?
Acculturation can happen both at the individual and societal levels. At the smallest level, acculturation is the adoption and assimilation of an alien culture by an individual. As the individual “ingests” different aspects of a culture, they come to incorporate them into how they live their daily lives.
This process can also alter psychological and physical well-being. Thus, acculturation can lead to changes in values, attitudes, abilities, motives, and personal identity.
Values are a set of basic convictions that a person has about what is good or bad, right or wrong. They guide one’s actions, decisions, and judgments.
Attitudes are predispositions to respond favorably or unfavorably to certain people, objects, ideas, or situations. Like values, they guide behavior.
Abilities are the learned capacity to perform certain kinds of tasks or functions. Motives are the underlying reasons that drive people’s behavior: the “whys” behind what they do. Personal identity is different again. It is who people think they are, their sense of self (Berry, 2008).
For one instance of how acculturation could change one’s values, attitudes, abilities, and motives, consider someone who moves from a highly religious community to a highly secularized one.
Values around alcohol illustrate this well. A highly religious community may see alcohol as morally wrong, while a secular community may see it as morally neutral. Someone moving between the two may start out viewing drinkers as immoral. That view often shifts.
This dissonance between a person’s own values and those of their new culture can cause psychological distress. Over time, though, exposure changes things. The person may learn that people in the new culture drink in specific social situations, to bond and socialize.
The observer’s own attitude toward drinking often becomes less negative. They may even learn to drink responsibly themselves, motivated by a desire to “fit in” (Berry, 2008).
How do individuals acculturate?
One of the most visible signs that someone is acculturating to a new culture is when they learn the language of that culture.
Language learning can happen in different ways and to different degrees. It can happen formally, through classes or other instruction. It can also happen informally, simply by listening and speaking with people who already know the language.
Speed varies widely. Some people learn a new language quickly, while others never fully master it. That speed depends on a variety of factors, both innate and intentional.
Children, for example, tend to pick up new languages more quickly and with fewer accent barriers than adults.
This isn’t the whole story. Even immigrants who already know a culture’s language may go through linguistic accommodation. This is when they change how they speak to match native speakers, often adjusting pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and even body language.
Someone acculturating to a new culture might pick up local slang or new gestures (Berry, 2008). Not everyone does this, though.
Some people resist learning the new language altogether. They may feel a strong attachment to their native language, or simply stay within their immigrant community.
Differences in pronunciation and grammar between someone’s native and target language can also create real barriers to language acquisition, and so to full immersion in the new culture.
What Is Acculturative Stress?
Acculturative stress is the psychological distress that can come from the process of adapting to a new culture. Berry, Kim, Minde, and Mok (1987) provided the classic study of the phenomenon.
The Classic Study: Berry et al. (1987)
Aim: To test whether acculturative stress is measurable and predictable, not just random distress.
Method: The sample was large. Researchers studied 1,197 people across five acculturating groups living in Canada.
Groups Studied: Immigrants, refugees, sojourners, Indigenous peoples, and established ethnic minorities were all assessed. A shared set of psychological, somatic, and social stress measures was used.
Results: Stress levels varied by group. Refugees, who typically have the least choice over migration, showed higher stress than voluntary immigrants.
Other Factors: Sex, age, and education mattered too. Stress was linked to language barriers, lost social support, and isolation.
Conclusion: Acculturative stress is real. It depends on who is acculturating and under what circumstances, including whether migration was voluntary or forced.
Evaluation: But the study has limits. It relies on self-report measures, and correlation is not causation. It cannot establish that strategy causes stress, rather than the other way around.
Several factors combine to produce this stress:
- Language Barriers: Difficulty communicating can make everyday tasks like shopping or finding work frustrating, and can leave people feeling isolated, which can lead to anxiety and depression.
- Lost Social Support: Family and friends may not be nearby, and the community ties people had at home often do not exist in a new country.
- Different Social Norms: Even the unwritten rules of meeting people can differ sharply between cultures, which can leave immigrants feeling like outsiders.
- Social Comparison: Comparing themselves to others who seem to be adjusting faster can leave immigrants feeling inferior and lower their self-esteem.
- Reverse Culture Shock: Returning to one’s native culture after a long absence, especially after a lot of assimilation, can feel just as disorienting as arriving somewhere new.
- Coping Strategies: Maintaining ties to one’s home culture, building a supportive community in the new culture, practicing self-care, and seeking professional help when needed can all lighten these effects.
Acculturation strategy itself predicts how much stress a person reports. People who integrate (keeping their heritage culture while engaging with the host culture) report the lowest average acculturative stress. Marginalization produces the highest, with assimilation and separation falling in between (Berry, 2005).
Acculturative stress is not just psychological. Immigrant health tends to converge toward host-country norms the longer people live in a new country, for better or worse.
Coronary heart disease among Polish immigrants to Canada rose over time from an initially lower rate. It fell among immigrants from Australia and New Zealand from an initially higher one (Berry, 1998).
What Are Behavioral Shifts?
Behavioral shifts are psychological changes that result from cultural contact, as Berry described. Almost any behavior can change through contact with another culture, from clothing and speech to values and identity.
Common examples include:
- Appearance and Speech: Immigrants may change how they dress to fit in, alter their speech to sound more like native speakers, or pick up new gestures and body language (Berry et al., 1994).
- Values and Attitudes: Someone might come to value punctuality more highly after moving to a culture that emphasizes timekeeping, or adopt the dominant culture’s beliefs about gender roles.
- Identity: A person may start to think of themselves as belonging to a different race or ethnicity than before.
- Beyond Ethnic Groups: These shifts do not require contact between different ethnic groups. Someone who spends a lot of time around a much younger crowd, for example, may pick up their slang and music tastes.
Convergence and Divergence
Behavioral shifts happen at the group level too, not just individually. When groups interact, they often adopt each other’s behaviors to fit in. This is called convergence.
Divergence is the opposite. Groups move apart and adopt different behaviors instead. Convergence tends to go with assimilation and integration, while divergence tends to go with separation and marginalization (Berry et al., 1994).
Which group’s behaviors spread the furthest is not random. Political and economic power imbalances typically determine which culture’s practices dominate this exchange, rather than the process running equally in both directions (Berry, 2008).
The spread of English and individualist values through Japan and South Korea after the Second World War, discussed above, is one example of this kind of uneven, power-driven exchange.
Critical Evaluation of Acculturation Theory
Berry’s four-strategy model is the most widely used framework in acculturation psychology. It is not without criticism, though. Two concerns stand out: how well the model actually predicts outcomes, and how narrow its evidence base is.
Predictive Validity and a Narrow Evidence Base
Rudmin (2003) traced acculturation theorizing back through dozens of competing typologies developed between 1918 and 1984. His review found deep problems across the field: inconsistent terminology, weak citation of earlier work, and a logical gap in the four-category model itself.
The logic itself is the sharpest critique.
Two genuinely continuous, independent dimensions should not produce just four neat types. Treating “integration,” “assimilation,” “separation,” and “marginalization” as clean categories may impose false structure on what is really continuous variation.
Zhou (1997) backs this up with evidence.
A person’s acculturation “strategy” shifts with situational factors, such as who they migrate with and their prior familiarity with the host language. The same person can be scored differently depending on when their strategy is measured, which undermines the model’s predictive validity.
The evidence base is narrow too.
Most acculturation research studies migration from poorer countries toward richer, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Very little equivalent research exists on migration in the opposite direction, or on non-Western host societies.
Adjustment patterns differ even within Europe itself.
That raises a real question: how much of what is claimed as universal about acculturation would hold up in societies with very different economic structures or welfare systems?
Contemporary Research
The strongest recent evidence comes from a meta-analysis by Dimitrova, Chasiotis, and Van de Vijver (2016), which sits at the top of the evidence hierarchy for this question.
Aim: To test two competing patterns in the European evidence: “migration morbidity” (worse outcomes for immigrant children) and the “immigrant paradox” (equal or better outcomes), and what moderates them.
Method: The authors analyzed 51 studies with a combined 224,197 participants, comparing immigrant and native-born children and youth across Europe.
That is a large sample.
Results: Migration morbidity was more strongly supported overall than the immigrant paradox, though the pattern varied widely by context.
Where It Varied: Externalizing problems were higher in Northern Europe and among adolescents. Academic underperformance was concentrated in low-income samples.
A more diverse receiving society and a longer stay were both linked to better outcomes.
Conclusion: There is no single “immigrant experience” of adjustment in Europe. It depends on where children live, what is measured, and conditions services can influence, such as family reunification.
Acculturation Gaps Within Families
Within families, children of immigrants often acculturate faster than their parents. Smokowski and Bacallao (2006) studied 481 foreign- and U.S.-born Latino adolescents in North Carolina and Arizona using structural equation modelling.
They found that acculturation conflicts and perceived discrimination were linked, through disrupted family processes, to increased adolescent aggression. This traces an actual mechanism, not just a correlation.
When family functioning stays positive despite a parent’s acculturative stress, children show fewer self-esteem, depression, and substance-use problems.
Biculturalism as a Psychological Asset
A separate body of research asks whether biculturalism helps or harms adjustment. Nguyen and Benet-Martínez’s (2013) meta-analysis pooled 83 studies and 322 effect sizes across 23,197 participants.
Biculturalism was more strongly linked to psychological and sociocultural adjustment than holding only one cultural orientation. But not every bicultural person benefits equally.
Benet-Martínez and Haritatos (2005) developed the concept of Bicultural Identity Integration (BII): how compatible and blended a person’s two cultural identities feel, versus oppositional and separate.
People low in BII feel torn between their two cultures. They are more vulnerable to identity conflict than high-BII people with an outwardly similar bicultural profile.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a criticism of acculturation?
A criticism of acculturation is that it can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation in immigrants.
Immigrants may compare themselves to others who seem to be assimilating faster. This social comparison can trigger feelings of inferiority and lower self-esteem.
Acculturative stress can also strike in reverse. Migrants who return to their native culture after a long absence often find they no longer fit in.
This is called reverse culture shock. Family ties, friendships, and even the pace of daily life can all feel unfamiliar again.
A related criticism is structural. When a society only tolerates a ‘melting pot’ approach, integration stops being a real option. It gets foreclosed for anyone who wants to keep their heritage culture, regardless of what that person actually prefers (Berry, 2008).
What are the differences between acculturation and assimilation?
Acculturation refers to the changes that occur in individuals or groups as a result of sustained contact with another culture. These changes can be behavioral, cognitive, or psychological, and can occur in the minority culture, the majority culture, or both.
Assimilation is different.
It is one specific acculturation outcome: immigrants adopt the dominant culture’s values and behaviors and give up their own. Acculturation itself is two-way. It can change both groups (Berry, 2008). Assimilation moves in one direction only, from minority toward majority.
In assimilation, the minority culture moves toward the majority culture until it loses its own distinct markers of language, food, and customs. Acculturation more broadly can leave those markers intact even as the minority culture changes (Kim, 2007).
What is the difference between acculturation and enculturation?
Enculturation is a process by which individuals learn the values and norms of a society through direct experience. This usually happens during childhood.
Parents and other adults socialize children into their culture. It can also happen later in life, such as when someone moves to a new country and is exposed to a different culture.
Enculturation involves acquiring the rules, norms, and values of one’s own society.
Acculturation is different. It is the process of transforming one’s own cultural beliefs and customs by adopting those of a different culture (Kim, 2007).
Kim (2007) frames the distinction this way: enculturation is about the culture someone is born into, while acculturation is about a different culture they encounter later, often through migration.
What is biculturalism?
Biculturalism is the ability to identify with two cultures at once. It can develop when someone is raised in two cultures, or keeps a strong tie to their heritage culture while living in the majority culture.
Bicultural individuals often move easily between both cultures. They tend to see the world from multiple perspectives and think more flexibly as a result.
Biculturalism has real benefits. It can also bring confusion.
Some biculturals feel they do not fully belong to either culture. Finding a balance between the two can be a genuine struggle (Nguyen & Benet-Martinez, 2013).
Researchers have a name for how compatible a person’s two cultural identities feel, rather than conflicting and separate: Bicultural Identity Integration (Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005). Not everyone scores the same on it. Someone low on this measure tends to feel torn between their two cultures more often.
What is cultural resistance?
Cultural resistance is a term for the various ways people resist the dominant culture.
This can happen when individuals keep their own cultural values and traditions alive. It can also happen when they adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to challenge it.
Resistance takes many forms, including art and music. Cultural resistance can be a positive force. It can help marginalized groups maintain their identity and take pride in their culture.
It can also be a negative force, leading to further alienation and separation from the mainstream (Duncombe, 2002).
This resistance is not passive. Choosing to keep a language, a style of dress, or a religious practice under pressure to change is itself a form of resistance, not simply an absence of adaptation.
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