Traditional studies of ethnic relations focus on racialization between Whites and
Blacks, or ethnic stratification between Whites and people of color. The increasingly
integrated world has ensured continued movements of humans and goods and the
inevitable contacts between people of different cultural background. This dissertation
aims at broadening conventional studies of interethnic relations to examine racial
attitudes among people who have internalized more than one culture -- i.e. the biculturals
and multiculturals. Social psychological research suggests that bicultural individuals are
capable of switching between two cultural meaning frames depending on contextual
demands. Bicultural individuals vary in how well they integrate the two cultural
identities internalized in them -- i.e., their bicultural identity integration levels (BII
levels). Their BII levels lead to either culturally congruent or culturally incongruent
behaviors among bicultural individuals. The underlying assumption of linguistic
intergroup bias indicates that people tend to describe more abstractly observed positive
ingroup behaviors and negative outgroup behaviors and describe more concretely observed negative ingroup behaviors and positive outgroup behaviors. In this study,
bicultural Asian American participants are hypothesized to use language of either higher
or lower abstraction to describe actions of positive and negative valence performed by
either ethnic Asians or European Americans depending on the cultural priming they
received and their BII levels. The study results point out the perceived ingroup/outgroup
orientation of the bicultural participants towards their coethnics and people of the
mainstream culture. Effects of the cultural priming and impact of BII levels are also discussed. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6538 |
| Date | 16 October 2009 |
| Creators | Hsu, Ling-hui |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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