Understanding Exclusionary Reactions Toward a Foreign Culture

Abstract

Recent research has begun to examine the impact of cultural mixing on human psychology. We conducted four experiments to examine the influence of intrusive cultural mixing on implicit intergroup attitudes. Our results indicated that (a) intrusive cultural mixing augmented implicit prejudice toward the intruding foreign cultural group (Study 1), (b) heightened implicit prejudice partially mediated boycotting behavior provoked by intrusive cultural mixing (Study 2), and (c) both cultural identification (Study 3) and multicultural orientation (Study 4) moderated the influence of intrusive cultural mixing on implicit prejudice so that only individuals who highly identified with their heritage culture or those who exhibited a weak multicultural orientation manifested enhanced implicit prejudice. These findings extend our understanding of the influence of cultural mixing.