Who adopts the culture of ethnic minority groups? A personality perspective on majority-group members’ acculturation

Acculturation is commonly conceptualized as a two-way process in which all groups involved in intercultural contact change. Yet, very little is known about the acculturation orientations of majority-group members and the factors that differentiate those who adopt aspects of minority groups’ culture from those who reject them. In the present research, we for the first time aimed to answer this question from a personality perspective. A total of 301 White majority-group members living in the U.S. first completed a personality assessment and then indicated the extent to which they maintained their own culture and adopted the culture of ethnic minority groups. Our analytic approach combined top-down variable-centered and bottom-up person-centered analyses. In terms of variable-centered analyses, participants who adopted the culture of minority groups scored lower on conscientiousness and higher on openness. Moreover, adoption of minority-group cultures was positively associated with the personality facets sociability and inquisitiveness, and negatively with modesty and prudence. In terms of person-centered analyses, four acculturation clusters emerged, resembling strategies commonly observed among minority groups: marginalization, separation, integration and a diffuse strategy in which participants scored around the midpoint on own culture maintenance as well as minority culture adoption. Interestingly, especially this diffuse cluster differed from the other clusters on personality traits and facets, with participants tending to be more open than integrated and separated individuals, and less conscientious than separated individuals. The present report suggests that personality traits may help explain how majority-group members acculturate and highlights avenues for future research.


Introduction
Although acculturation is defined as a two-way process in which all groups involved in contact change (Berry, 2008), most research has focused on cultural change among immigrants and ethnic minority groups. Such research has focused on majority-group members' acculturation expectations or prejudice and discrimination (Bourhis, Moïse, Perreault, & Senecal, 1997;Horenczyk, Jasinskaja-Lahti, Sam, & Vedder, 2013;Kunst, Thomsen, & Dovidio, 2019;Piontkowski, Rohmann, & Florack, 2002), rather than how majority-group members acculturate themselves. This lack of research is particularly striking, given that societies around the world are becoming more

Participants
A total of 308 participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid equivalent to $7/hour. Of these, 301 participants who indicated their ethnic background as "White/Caucasian" were retained for analyses. Sample demographics are presented in Table 1.

Personality traits and facets
On scales ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), participants completed the 60-item HEXACO inventory (Ashton & Lee, 2009). Each ten items assessed the personality traits honesty-humility, emotionality, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. In addition, following Ashton and Lee (2009), four facets were computed for each trait. All reliability estimates are presented in Table 2. 1

Acculturation orientations
Adapting a measure from previous research (Haugen & Kunst, 2017), on scales ranging from 1 (not important at all) to 5 (extremely important), participants completed six items assessing their own/mainstream culture maintenance (e.g., "How important is it for you to maintain mainstream American traditions?"; α = .95) and six corresponding items measuring the adoption of culture from minority-group members (e.g., "How important is it for you to participate in the traditions of ethnic minority-group members?"; α = .94). The acculturation domains included way of living, traditions, values, belonging, contact and culture generally. The two-dimensional structure was fully supported by factor analyses that extracted two components (Eigenvalues 5.52 and 3.99; other Eigenvalues <.64). All items loaded cleanly (>.80) on one of the two components without cross-loadings (<.16) in a varimax-rotated solution. Both dimensions were weakly correlated, r(299) = .17, p = .003.

Analyses
In terms of variable-centered analyses, we first tested the correlations of the personality traits and facets with acculturation orientations. Next, we ran separate regression models testing the unique influence of (i) all personality traits and (ii) all facets. In terms of the person-centered approach, we conducted k-mean cluster analyses with the acculturation variables to identify subgroups of participants within the data. To identify the optimal number of clusters, the NBClust package (Charrad, Ghazzali, Boiteau, & Niknafs, 2014) was used in R. This package calculates 30 different indices to identify the optimal number of clusters by rotating different numbers of clusters, distance types, and methods of clustering. Once the optimal clustering solution was determined, the clusters were visualized using the factoextra package (Kassambara & Mundt, 2019), and personality differences between the extracted clusters were tested using analyses of variance (ANOVA). To control for Type-1 error inflation, Holm correction was applied to between-cluster comparisons (that is, for mean comparisons between the different acculturation strategies that were identified).

Variable-centered analyses
F-tests and multicollinearity estimates are presented for each model in the Note of Table 2. In terms of traits, adoption of minoritygroup culture was negatively related to conscientiousness, and positively to openness. By contrast, own culture maintenance was related to more emotionality and extraversion and to less openness.
To ease interpretation, the bivariate correlations between the personality facets and the two acculturation orientations are visualized in Fig. 1, while exact p-values and regression coefficients are presented in Table 2. In terms of the honesty-humility facets, only modesty was negatively related to minority-group culture adoption, but this relationship failed to remain statistically significant in the regression analysis. By contrast, fairness was positively, and greed-avoidance and modesty negatively, correlated with own culture maintenance. Only for modesty did this relationship fail to reach significance in the regression analysis.
Three out of four emotionality facets were positively related to own culture maintenance, whereas no significant relationship was observed with minority culture adoption. Specifically, fearfulness, dependence and sentimentality were each positively related to own culture maintenance in terms of zero-order correlations. However, none of these relationships remained significant in the regression analysis. In terms of extraversion facets, sociability was positively associated with both types of acculturation orientations. Additionally, liveliness was positively related to own culture maintenance, but this relationship was statistically non-significant in the regression analysis. None of the agreeableness facets were related to any acculturation variable. In terms of conscientiousness, prudence was negatively correlated with minority culture adoption, but this relationship fell below significance in regression analyses. Organization was weakly and positively associated with own culture maintenance. Finally, in terms of openness to experience, inquisitiveness was related to higher levels of minority culture adoption, whereas aesthetic appreciation, creativity and unconventionality were related to less own culture maintenance.

Person-centered analyses
A comparison of the different cluster solutions indicated most support for four clusters (see Supplementary materials for the R output of the 30 indices). Hence, four clusters were extracted (see Fig. 2). Three clusters were readily interpretably, resembling the strategies separation, integration and marginalization. One "diffuse" cluster was observed in which participants on average scored around the midpoint of both dimensions. Yet, the cluster also included some individuals that seemed rather assimilated to minoritygroup cultures.
In terms of traits, participants in the diffuse cluster showed less conscientiousness than in the separated cluster (see Table 3). Moreover, participants in the diffuse cluster showed higher openness than participants in the separated and integrated clusters.
In terms of honesty-humility facets, participants in the marginalized and diffuse clusters showed lower fairness than those in the separated cluster. Next, diffuse participants showed more greed-avoidance than those in the separated and integrated clusters. Marginalized participants showed more modesty than integrated participants.
Only one difference each reached significance for the emotionality and extraversion facets: marginalized individuals showed less Fig. 1. The zero-order correlations between own culture maintenance and minority culture adoption with the personality facets are displayed. For significance tests, please see Table 2. sentimentality than separated individuals, and less sociability than integrated individuals. No differences were observed for the agreeableness facets, mirroring the lack of findings in the variable-centered analyses (compare Tables 2 and 3).
In terms of conscientiousness facets, participants in the diffuse cluster scored lower than separated individuals on organization, diligence and prudence. Finally, in terms of openness facets, participants in the separated cluster showed less unconventionality than participants in the marginalized and diffuse clusters. Moreover, participants in the integrated cluster showed less unconventionality than participants in the diffuse cluster.

Discussion
Although acculturation commonly is defined as a process of mutual accomodation (Berry, 2008), very little is known about the acculturation of majority-group members. The present research aimed to address this gap, focusing on the role of personality. Results from the variable-centered analyses showed that majority-group members in the U.S. who scored high on openness reported more adoption of minority-group cultures, which is in line with some research among minority-group members. For instance, Ryder et al. (2000) showed that minority-group members' adoption of the mainstream culture was related to more openness (also see Ramdhonee & Bhowon, 2012;Zhang, Mandl, & Wang, 2010). Hence, openness may generally predict more adoption of other cultures than one's own, regardless of whether one belongs to the societal majority-or a minority-group.
On first sight, some of our findings were less consistent with previous research among minority groups. Conscientiousness (including its prudence facet) was negatively related to majority-group members' adoption of minority cultures, which contrasts with Ryder et al. (2000) who found that conscientiousness was positively related to minority-group members' mainstream culture adoption. Yet, this apparent difference may be explained by assimilative norms in the U.S. encouraging minority-group members to adopt the mainstream culture, while arguably discouraging majority-group members from adopting minority cultures (Bourhis et al., 1997;Ward, Fox, Wilson, Stuart, & Kus, 2010). This interpretation would also be in line with research finding a robust correlation between conscientiousness and conformity (Olver & Mooradian, 2003). As such, to follow prevailing norms, conscientious minority-group members may adapt to the mainstream culture more, whereas conscientious majority-group members may adopt minority-group cultures less.
Extraversion and emotionality predicted more and openness less maintenance of majority-group members' own culture. Extraversion has been positively associated with maintenance of one's own culture in some work with minority-group members (e.g., Zhang et al., 2010). Also, for majority-group members, maintaining one's heritage culture seems to be facilitated by a personality that motivates people to actively seek contact with others. Yet, why then did extraversion not predict more adoption of minority-group cultures as well? We can only speculate that the relationship between extraversion and the adoption of cultures from other ethnic groups may be moderated by prejudice, such that this relationship may indeed be positive among individuals with favorable attitudes toward other groups.
The fact that emotionality was related to more own culture maintenance suggests that majority-group members, at least in the U.S., maintain their heritage culture in parts to reduce anxiety and ensure a feeling of belonging. This interpretation echoes work showing that White Americans often feel excluded by multiculturalism (Plaut et al., 2011).
When using a bottom-up cluster approach, four acculturation strategies could be identified similar to Haugen and Kunst (2017): separation, marginalization, integration and diffuse. Interestingly, the diffuse cluster showed the most distinct personality profile, with individuals being more open and less conscientious than participants in one or several of the other clusters. It may be that this diffuse pattern reflects some type of blended or hybrid identity, in which individuals combine aspects of both cultural spheres into something new. Future research should assess this with appropriate measures (e.g., Benet-Martinez & Haritatos, 2005;Ward, Ng Tseung-Wong, Szabo, Qumseya, & Bhowon, 2018). It should also be noted that the diffuse cluster was relatively broad and included a few individuals who could be best described as assimilated to minority-group cultures. Arguably, these individuals may be the most unconventional, but larger datasets are needed to reliably capture this acculturation strategy and its antecedents.
Different to previous work, a marginalization cluster was found, in which individuals on average were less conventional, sentimental and sociable than people in some of the other clusters. On first sight, one may think that these individuals actively chose a strategy of individualism rather than experiencing cultural alienation (Bourhis et al., 1997;Kunst & Sam, 2013). At the same time, it is important to pay attention to the cultural context of investigation when interpreting these results. In the U.S., many majority-group members favor a colorblind approach to diversity, in which the importance of culture is generally downplayed (Dovidio, Gaertner, Ufkes, Saguy, & Pearson, 2016). Hence, the marginalization cluster may reflect this particular stance to cultural diversity.
Given the lack of previous research into majority-group members' acculturation, our work was mostly exploratory. As such, the present findings need to be validated in future confirmatory research. Moreover, although Berry's (1997) model has been validated among majority-group members (e.g., Haugen & Kunst, 2017;Lefringhausen & Marshall, 2016), we agree that the theoretical framework for majority-group members is still underdeveloped. Our research may, thus, provide some basis for future theoretical development.
One may argue that, whereas personality traits are antecedents of acculturation, they likely do not influence it directly but through specific acculturation processes. One such process may be the way people respond to cultural differences. As such, personality traits may lead to different types of intercultural sensitivity, which in turn make people acculturate in different ways. Here, Bennett (1986)'s developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (DMIS) may offer fruitful insights (also see Bennett, 1993;Bennett & Bennett, 2004). This framework ranks intercultural sensitivity on a scale from ethnocentric to ethnorelativist. Applied to our results, it is possible that personality traits such as openness lead majority-group members to more ethnorelativist stages of intercultural sensitivity, which in turn facilitate the adoption of other groups' culture. By contrast, traits such as emotionality may lead to an ethnocentric defensive style that, in turn, makes majority-group members focus primarily on their own culture. Such a finding would be in line with work by Lefringhausen and Marshall (2016) who demonstrated that immigrant culture adoption correlates positively with ethnorelativism and negatively with ethnocentrism.
It should also be noted that some of the DMIS stages can be seen as closely related to the acculturation orientations we identified. For instance, the separation orientation we observed may be driven by a motivation to defend oneself and one's group against cultural differences, whereas integration may be nurtured by a tendency to accept and adapt to cultural differences or possibly even by the development of an ethnorelativist identity. However, frameworks such as the DMIS may arguably offer the most important insights in terms of the marginalization and diffuse clusters. Does marginalization reflect a tendency to minimize cultural differences or rather reflect a more ethnorelativist style such as "constructive marginality" (Bennett, 1986)? Where can the diffuse cluster be located on a spectrum from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism? These are questions that longitudinal research may investigate, for instance, by measuring intercultural sensitivity as well as majority acculturation orientations and strategies. At the same time, given the infancy of research on majority-group members' acculturation, qualitative and mixed-methods research (see, e.g., Haugen & Kunst, 2017) may offer important insights that are lost by solely taking a quantitative approach.
Notably, our data was correlational and hence cannot speak to causality. Yet, given that about half of the variance in personality traits is heritable (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015), they likelyat least to some extentcausally influence the acculturation of majority-group members. However, a gene-environment interaction perspective would suggest that the effects of personality traits on acculturation orientations of majority-group members likely also depend on people's upbringing and place of living. Future research could test such interactions statistically, for instance focusing on moderating contextual factors such as relational mobility (Thomson et al., 2018) or tightness/looseness (Gelfand et al., 2011).
Although we presented both bivariate correlations and regression analyses in the variable-centered approach, and controlled for multiple comparisons for the person-centered approach, the high number of tests statistically increases the chance of false positives. This highlights the need to replicate our findings to test their robustness. Moreover, our study was based on a sample drawn from an online panel that is more representative than convenient samples but still not fully representative (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011), and was collected in a settler society. Hence, future research is needed to replicate and extend our findings in different cultures and contexts.
Future research could further investigate how personality relates to majority-members' acculturation by more clearly distinguishing between attitudes and self-reported behavior. This may also simplify the wording of measurement items. Finally, in the present research, we assessed acculturation in terms of the culture of minority-groups more broadly. As acculturation expectations are known to vary for valued and devalued groups (Kunst & Sam, 2014;Safdar, Dupuis, Lewis, El-Geledi, & Bourhis, 2008), it is possible that the adoption of their cultures varies accordingly. As the results of this first investigation suggests, a personality perspective may help elucidate those differences.