Cultural contact and behavioural change

Sustained contact between people from different cultural backgrounds can bring cultural and psychological change. This process is called Acculturation. Changes may affect language use and values, as well as relationships and everyday practices. People don't all change in the same direction, and change is not confined to the minority group.

An acculturation strategy describes an orientation towards maintaining a heritage culture and participating in the wider society. These are separate issues: keeping cultural traditions does not automatically mean rejecting participation in the wider community.

Four strategies

The four strategies can be organised around two questions: does a person maintain their heritage culture, and do they participate in the wider society? Use these categories as a framework for understanding behaviour, rather than as permanent labels for people.

Acculturation strategies classified by two independent orientations.

• Integration involves maintaining the heritage culture while participating in the wider society. As an acculturation strategy, it might be seen in a young person who speaks their family's language at home and takes an active role in a local youth organisation.
• Assimilation is an acculturation strategy in which a person participates in the wider society without maintaining the heritage culture. Someone might adopt the wider society's everyday practices and stop taking part in their family's cultural celebrations.
• Separation involves maintaining the heritage culture with limited participation in the wider society. With this acculturation strategy, social relationships and activities may stay concentrated within the heritage community.
• Marginalization is an acculturation strategy involving limited maintenance of the heritage culture and limited participation in the wider society. A person may feel weak connections to both communities.

Effects on human behaviour

Strategies can shape whom people choose as friends and how they communicate. They can also affect participation in groups and willingness to seek support. Integration may give people access to several support networks, though conflicting expectations can still be demanding to manage. Separation may preserve valued relationships and traditions while limiting opportunities for contact outside the community. With assimilation, participation may become easier, but tension can arise with relatives who value cultural continuity. Marginalization may be associated with isolation and difficulty finding a sense of belonging.

The psychological strain associated with adapting to contact between cultures is called Acculturative stress. Language barriers and discrimination can contribute to it, as can incompatible expectations. No strategy guarantees either stress or well-being.

People aren't always free to choose their strategies. A welcoming institution may make integration possible; exclusion may restrict participation even when someone wants it. Behaviour can also vary between settings. The same person may maintain traditions at home and adopt different practices at work. To explain an outcome, consider both the person's orientation and the opportunities available to them.

Changing behaviour through requests

Compliance is a change in behaviour in response to a request from another person or group. Someone may agree to act without privately accepting the requester's position. Compliance techniques are planned ways of presenting requests to increase the likelihood of agreement.

In a group setting, these techniques can encourage individuals to contribute to a shared activity. To explain how they work, connect the sequence of requests to the behaviour being changed. Simply calling a request persuasive doesn't explain the mechanism.

Foot-in-the-door

The foot-in-the-door technique is a compliance technique in which agreement to a small request is followed by a larger, related request.

Imagine a community gardening group asking residents to add their names to a list supporting a shared garden. Later, it asks those residents to join a maintenance session. Adding their names may encourage residents to see themselves as supporters of the project. The later request can then feel consistent with their earlier action and self-image.

The order matters. The small request comes first; the later request builds on it. The diagram shows how that initial commitment can make a more demanding contribution easier to accept.

The influence is possible, not guaranteed. A resident may support the idea but have no time to help. If the first request feels manipulative, or the second asks far too much, the sequence may not produce the intended change.

Door-in-the-face

The door-in-the-face technique is a compliance technique in which a large request that is likely to be refused is followed by a smaller target request.

For example, a group might ask residents to maintain the garden every weekend. After they refuse, it asks for help at one session instead. The requester appears to make a concession, which may incline the resident to make one in return. By comparison, the smaller request may also seem less burdensome.

Unlike foot-in-the-door, this technique does not depend on agreement to the first request. It relies on refusal followed by an apparent reduction in demands.

Application and responsibility

These techniques can increase participation in group projects. Still, increased agreement does not necessarily mean lasting commitment: the behaviour may stop when the requests stop.

Responsible application gives people a genuine opportunity to refuse. Trust can suffer if a group conceals costs, exploits pressure or makes refusal socially uncomfortable. A group should distinguish successful recruitment from a process in which members felt unable to say no.

Responding to group expectations

Conformity is a change in behaviour or belief towards a group's position because of real or perceived group pressure. A group norm is a shared expectation about how members should behave. Norms may govern turn-taking or acceptable clothing. They can also shape how openly members express disagreement.

Group members often behave similarly without anyone making a direct request. Conformity helps explain this: a person notices what others do and adjusts their own behaviour. Compliance is different because an identifiable request is central.

Two reasons for conforming

Normative social influence is a form of social influence in which a person conforms to gain acceptance or avoid rejection. Imagine a volunteer committee whose members routinely praise every proposal. Wanting to fit in, a new member may hold back criticism while privately doubting a proposal. Public agreement does not establish private belief.

Informational social influence is a form of social influence in which a person conforms because they regard others as a source of accurate information. At an unfamiliar community event, a newcomer might follow experienced members' instructions for sorting equipment, assuming those members know the procedure. Their agreement may reflect genuine acceptance of the group's judgement.

Either influence, or both, can produce the same behaviour. Watching someone agree with a group isn't enough to identify their reason.

Why conformity varies

Disagreeing with a unanimous group can be difficult: the individual sees no support for an alternative position. An ally who disagrees can reduce that pressure. Responding publicly can increase concern about evaluation. Uncertainty about a task, meanwhile, can increase reliance on other people's judgement. If a group matters strongly to a person, it may have greater influence over their behaviour.

These factors help explain why conformity varies. They don't mean that every member will conform. Personal knowledge can alter the response, as can competing commitments or the group's perceived credibility.

Understanding group outcomes

Conformity can support cooperation. By following shared procedures, members can coordinate their actions without renegotiating every decision. Yet conformity can also discourage useful disagreement or sustain harmful practices.

In the volunteer committee, repeated public agreement might be mistaken for genuine consensus. Understanding the group's behaviour requires distinguishing what members do publicly from what they believe privately. A confidential account of their views may reveal a different pattern, though a wish to appear independent or agreeable can influence self-reports themselves.

A framework for comparing cultural tendencies

A cultural dimension is a continuum that describes how shared values and practices vary between cultural groups. It helps us interpret broad patterns. It isn't a rule for predicting every individual's behaviour.

Individualism–collectivism concerns the relative emphasis placed on individual autonomy and obligations to groups. An orientation towards Individualism places relatively greater emphasis on personal independence, preferences and goals. An orientation towards Collectivism places relatively greater emphasis on interdependence, group obligations and shared goals.

These are relative tendencies, not two sealed categories. Someone may value independence in one setting but place more weight on family or group obligations in another.

Explaining group behaviour

Consider a student production team. An individualist orientation may encourage members to emphasise their own creative choices and seek recognition for their individual contributions. With a collectivist orientation, members may instead prioritise coordination and the success of the production as a whole.

The explanation rests on how people value the behaviour. Where personal choice is strongly valued, expressing an independent preference may be viewed positively. Where fulfilling group obligations is strongly valued, adjusting a preference to support the group may seem more appropriate.

Neither orientation makes people necessarily selfish or cooperative. Someone who independently chooses to help can support a group. Prioritising one's own group, though, can reduce cooperation with outsiders. Which group matters here is part of the explanation.

Culture does not remove individual variation

A cultural dimension can help explain differences in how groups distribute recognition, handle disagreement or balance personal preferences with shared duties. Those behaviours also depend on task demands, institutional rules and individual experience.

Don't infer an individual's values from their nationality. A country-level tendency cannot tell us how every resident thinks; cultural groups contain substantial variation. National boundaries are also an imperfect way to identify shared culture.

Measuring the proposed explanation

A questionnaire could investigate this interpretation by asking about preferences for personal choice and obligations to a team, alongside questions about actual group participation. Keep values separate from behaviour in the measures. Endorsing teamwork does not prove that someone contributes consistently.

An association between reported cultural orientation and group behaviour would support a relationship. On its own, it would not establish that the orientation caused the behaviour: group experiences may also shape values. Translations and response styles need attention too. Differences in answers may reflect how people understand the questions rather than genuine differences in cultural orientation.

When group membership becomes part of the self

Social identity theory explains intergroup behaviour: identifying with social groups contributes to people's self-concept and shapes how they treat groups. The part of a person's self-concept that comes from group membership, together with the value and emotional significance attached to it, is their social identity.

An in-group is a group a person identifies as belonging to; an out-group is one they see as outside that membership. The labels depend on perspective. For members, their team is an in-group. For rivals, that same team is an out-group.

The explanatory processes

Classifying people, including oneself, into social groups is the process of social categorization. Through social identification, a person adopts a group membership as part of their self-concept. Social comparison is the process of evaluating oneself or one's group in relation to others.

These processes link noticing a group boundary to the behaviour that may follow. They are related, but they don't form a rigid sequence that everyone completes in exactly the same way.

Consider two teams sharing a community workshop. Members distinguish between the teams and begin to describe themselves as members of their own team. They also compare the teams' achievements. If membership matters to their identity, a favourable comparison can support a positive view of themselves.

A favourable difference that makes one's group seem positively differentiated from another group is called positive distinctiveness. Seeking it can contribute to in-group favouritism, the tendency to give one's own group preferential treatment. Workshop members might give their team the best equipment or judge its work more generously.

Favouring an in-group does not inevitably involve hostility towards an out-group. Simply assigning a label doesn't guarantee strong identification either. What that membership means to the person matters.

Applying the theory to change behaviour

The workshop could encourage members to see themselves as part of one community project. Joint planning and mixed-team responsibilities may make this broader membership more meaningful, as may recognition of collective achievements. If members begin to define success at this shared level, preferential treatment based on the original division may decrease.

Spending time together is not, by itself, the mechanism. Rather, the psychologically important boundary may shift from separate teams to a shared group.

There is no guarantee of this change. Existing status differences or unfair access to resources may keep the division in place. Members may also resist a shared identity if it seems to erase identities they value. A useful application therefore pairs meaningful shared membership with fair treatment while recognising subgroup contributions.

Learning from other people's behaviour

Social learning theory explains how people can acquire behaviour by observing others and the consequences of their actions. Learning by watching another person's behaviour is called Observational learning. A model is someone whose behaviour offers an example that an observer may learn from.

Learning and immediate performance aren't the same. Someone may learn how a group member behaves but choose not to copy that behaviour straight away.

How observation becomes behaviour

Four processes help explain whether an observed behaviour is learned and performed:

• Attention involves selecting information for mental processing. The observer must notice the relevant behaviour; a respected or prominent group member may draw particular attention.
• Retention involves keeping learned information available in memory. The observer must remember what the model did.
• Reproduction involves translating an observed behaviour into one's own action. To do this, the observer needs the necessary skills and opportunities.
• Motivation refers to the processes that direct and sustain behaviour towards a goal. The observer needs a reason to perform what they have learned.

Imagine an experienced discussion leader showing a group how to disagree respectfully. The leader acknowledges the previous speaker, explains a different view and invites a response. New members may pay attention to the demonstration and remember the sequence, then practise it. Whether they use it in a real discussion also depends on the consequences they expect.

Learning from consequences

Vicarious reinforcement occurs when seeing a model receive a favourable consequence for an observed behaviour increases the likelihood of performing that behaviour. If respectful disagreement receives appreciation, observers may become more willing to use it. With Vicarious punishment, seeing a model receive an unfavourable consequence for an observed behaviour decreases the likelihood of performing it.

Observers don't need to receive the consequence themselves. This helps explain how a pattern spreads through a group: members learn what to do as well as what the group appears to reward.

Applying the theory to change group behaviour

A group that wants to encourage inclusive discussion can ask credible members to demonstrate inviting quieter people to contribute. Observers need to be able to remember the behaviour and reproduce it, so it must be clear and feasible. Supportive responses should follow it. Opportunities to practise help turn the example they have observed into an action they can use.

This application can fail. Influential members may model the opposite behaviour, or observers may lack the necessary skills. It can also fail when respectful participation is publicly praised but interruptions actually gain more attention. What members see happening matters more than a slogan about how they should behave.

Social learning explains one route through which group behaviour develops, not automatic copying. Observers interpret the model and anticipate consequences; they may choose not to perform what they have learned.