Abstract
Previous research indicates that dispositional worry about potential threats is associated with greater ingroup biases. However, the nature of this relationship within minority cultural groups, and the specificity of which threats matter most for this relationship, remain poorly understood. The current study thus aimed to build on existing work in three key ways: by simultaneously examining the effects of threat in both a mainstream and an immigrant population, by examining associations between threats and cultural practices and real-life interactions, and by addressing whether concerns about disease threats or physical threats were more robust predictors. Thus, we investigated the relative influence of physical- and disease-threat concerns for acculturation and ingroup preferences in both immigrant and non-immigrant Americans (N = 964, 171 immigrants). Immigrant Americans completed an acculturation survey in which their engagement with their heritage culture was compared with their engagement with mainstream American culture. Meanwhile, non-immigrant Americans responded to similar items assessing their engagement with US versus foreign cultural practices. Results indicated that dispositional worry about physical threats was associated with lower acculturation in immigrant participants, and lower engagement with foreign cultures in non-immigrant Americans. Further, in the combined sample, participants who were more concerned about physical threats were less likely to have had a romantic partner of a different ethnicity than their own. By contrast, dispositional worry about disease threat did not reliably predict cultural engagement or partner choice. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that physical-threat concern leads to less engagement with foreign cultures.
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There were six participants who said they had spent most of their lives outside of the USA but also stated that they were born in the USA. Our survey logic put these participants in the immigrant category and they thus answered questions on acculturation. We thus decided to retain these participants, despite some ambiguity as to whether they should correctly belong in this category. Excluding these participants made no meaningful difference to results.
Given that the use of multiple regressions to test incremental validity can sometimes lead to false positives resulting from measurement error (e.g., Wang and Eastwick 2020), we also ran parallel regression analyses for all the multiple regressions reported here using extracted single factors from principal components analysis in the place of mean scores for the three independent variables. This had no meaningful effect on results, other than that the effect of BDW on the likelihood of having a same-ethnicity partner became nonsignificant in an analysis using these factor scores (p = .06) when controlling for germ aversion, perceived infectability, sex, income, ethnicity, and age. The effect of BDW remained significant (p = .02) in the first model described, which did not include germ aversion or perceived infectability.
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Kerry, N., Airington, Z. & Murray, D.R. Cultures of Fear: Individual Differences in Perception of Physical (but Not Disease) Threats Predict Cultural Neophobia in both Immigrant and Mainstream Americans. Evolutionary Psychological Science 6, 335–345 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-020-00238-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-020-00238-w