Acculturation of the Self: A Cross-Cultural Study in Belgium, Morocco and Turkey

This study is part of a larger cross-cultural preparatory study of the ERC-project PsychAcc (Grant 101117043; for more information please refer to the following website: https://research.kuleuven.be/EU/p/he/p1/erc/psychacc). European societies are becoming increasingly diverse, with about 29 pct. of European citizens belonging to an ethnic minority group. Consequently, it is of critical importance to understand, more fully and deeply, the complexity of psychological acculturation – i.e., the changes that happen in one’s psychological and behavioral patterns due to sustained contact with another culture (Graves, 1967). While dominant theories of acculturation narrowly focus on ethnic minorities’ attitudes and identities that reflect their deliberate – or explicit – positions vis-à-vis their heritage and majority cultures (e.g., Berry, 1980), PsychAcc seeks to provide evidence that can support the existence of acculturation in three domains – i.e. self-construal, cognition, and motivation – building on the notion that people’s ways of being, thinking and drivers for action signal cultural affiliations implicitly. Therefore, we conducted a cross-cultural study comparing the psychological patterns of Belgian, Moroccan and Turkish majority youth with Moroccan-Belgian and Turkish-Belgian minority youth. In this study, we focus on the domain of self. The pre-registrations for cognition and motivation can be found here: OSF | PsychAcc Master File [ERC-Project 101117043]. Based on a literature review on cultural differences in self-construal, we included six measures for self-construal: Culture and Identity Research Network Self-Construal Scale (SCS-CIRNS) - Version 3 (Yang et al., 2018; Uskul et al., 2023, i.e., the most recent version of the multidimensional self-construal scale by Vignoles et al., 2016); Self-construal Scale (Singelis, 1994); Sixfold Self-Construal Scale (Harb & Smith et al., 2008); Relational, Individual and Collective Self-aspects Scale (RIC) (Kashima and Hardie, 2000); Modified Autonomy and Relatedness Scale (ARS) (Güngör et al., 2014); Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale (Aaron et al., 1992). We expect to find cultural differences in the mean levels of self-construal, as well as in the “patterns” of self. To examine cultural differences in self-construal patterns, we use the “cultural fit approach” (De Leersnyder, 2014). This method allows us to investigate to what extent the self-construal patterns of Moroccan-Belgian and Turkish-Belgian minority youth ‘fit’ the Belgian and Turkish/Moroccan majority patterns, and whether they fit less well with each of these patterns than do their majority counterparts, respectively. Previous work by Yilmaz et al., (2024) has provided preliminary evidence for fit in self-construal. In study 1, they found meaningful between group differences: Turkish majority students had a higher fit with the average Turkish self-construal pattern and a lower fit with the average Belgian majority self-construal pattern compared to Belgian majority students. Moreover, Turkish Belgian minority students had a lower fit with the average Belgian majority self-construal pattern than Belgian majority students, and they also had a lower fit with the average Turkish majority self-construal pattern compared to Turkish majority students. In study 2, which included Belgian majority students, and second- and first-generation Turkish Belgian minority students, Yilmaz and colleagues found that Belgian majority students had the highest fit with the average Belgian majority self-construal pattern, first-generation Turkish Belgian students had the lowest fit with the Belgian majority self-construal pattern, with second-generation Turkish Belgian students falling in between. Taken together, these findings point to acculturation of the self. We build on this work and similarly expect to find evidence of acculturation of the self. However, by using a variety of measures that capture different aspects of self-construal, we aim to gain a more fine-grained understanding of cultural variation in self-construal. Additionally, our sample includes both Moroccan majority and Moroccan-Belgian minority students.