Divided loyalties: Identity integration and cultural cues predict ingroup favoritism among biculturals

How do biculturals, or individuals who identify with more than one culture, manage their loyalties between two cultural ingroups? We argue that this process is moderated by Bicultural Identity Integration (BII), or individual differences in perceived conflict between two cultural identities. Two qua...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: CHENG, Chi-ying, HANEK, Kathrin J., ODOM, Annick C., LEE, Fiona
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3249
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4506/viewcontent/Divided_Loyalties_sv.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:How do biculturals, or individuals who identify with more than one culture, manage their loyalties between two cultural ingroups? We argue that this process is moderated by Bicultural Identity Integration (BII), or individual differences in perceived conflict between two cultural identities. Two quasi-experiments examined biculturals’ preferences for two competing groups, each representing one of their cultural identities, in response to cultural primes. In Study 1, we found that Flemish-Belgian biculturals with low BII, or those who perceive their cultural identities as conflicting, favored the primed cultural group less than the unprimed cultural group. In Study 2, we found the same effect among Asian-American biculturals, but only when the cultural primes were positive. These findings show that low BIIs exhibit psychological reactance to cultural primes that are seen as threatening to the self, which in turn affect their loyalties to competing cultural ingroups.