14.4 Challenges of Living in a Multicultural World

Until now, we have primarily focused on the many benefits of living in a multicultural world, including the cognitive and psychological benefits of bilingualism, cultural frame switching, and the regular use of code switching in the age of social media. This section will focus on some persistent challenges of living in a multicultural world.

Cultural Reaffirmation

Cultural reaffirmation is a phenomenon that occurs when multicultural individuals living in multicultural societies endorse even more traditional values than persons from their native country or monoculture individuals. Several instances have been observed in Western and Eastern cultures. For example, Kosmitzki (1996) examined monocultural and bicultural Germans and Americans who rated themselves, their cultural group, and their adopted cultural group. The bicultural individuals endorsed even more traits and values of the native culture than the monocultural individuals. Matsumoto et al. (1997) compared Japanese and Japanese Americans on ratings of interpersonal interactions and found that the Japanese Americans rated themselves higher in areas of collectivism than the Japanese nationals. Cultural reaffirmation has been explained by the stresses of immigrating or becoming part of a multicultural society. In other words, the immigrant group holds on to the native culture even as the native culture changes. In this way, the immigrant culture begins to conform to stereotypes.

Identity Denial

Identity denial occurs when individuals are not accepted as members of the group they identify with. To be clear, individuals are not denying their heritage, culture, or experience. Others who share their identity are rejecting them. Cheryan and Monin (2005) revealed that Asian Americans experience more identity denial than other ethnic groups in the United States. Howard and Pagan (2025) found similar concerns about identity denial in the Hispanic/Latine community in the U.S. The ability to speak Spanish is often seen as an essential part of cultural identity. It can also act as a way to decide who is considered “truly” Latine. Their study offers early evidence that some Hispanic/Latine individuals may question the identity of those who don’t speak Spanish, and may even be less likely to form friendships with them compared to those who are bilingual.

Thöni et al. (2022) found similar identity denial concerns among those people who are attracted to more than one sex and/or gender. Findings suggest that feeling like their identity is denied or not seen as valid—both by straight people and by some in the gay and lesbian community—can lead to negative emotions and stress. These experiences are especially harmful because plurisexual people often don’t get the same kind of support from the LGBTQ+ community that others might. This lack of support can leave them feeling isolated and may contribute to poor mental health outcomes for plurisexual individuals.

Stereotype Threat

As we learned earlier, stereotypes are generalized thoughts that influence our beliefs about others, but also beliefs about ourselves and even our performance on essential tasks. In some cases, these beliefs may be positive and make us feel more confident and better able to perform tasks. On the other hand, sometimes these beliefs are negative and make us perform more poorly just because of our knowledge about the stereotypes. One of the long-standing puzzles in the area of academic performance concerns why African American students in the United States perform more poorly on standardized tests, receive lower grades, and are less likely to remain in school in comparison with white students, even when other factors such as family income, parent’s level of education, and other relevant variables are controlled. Steele and Aronson (1995) tested the hypothesis that these differences might be due to the activation of negative stereotypes. They hypothesized that African American students are aware of the inaccurate stereotype that “African American students are intellectually inferior to white students,” and this stereotype creates a negative expectation. This negative expectation then interferes with students’ performance on intellectual and academic tests through fear of confirming that stereotype.

Results confirmed that African American college students performed worse, in comparison with their prior test scores, on math questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) when the test was described to them as a diagnostic measure of their mathematical abilities (and thus when the stereotype was relevant). Still, performance was not influenced when the same questions were framed as a problem-solving activity.

In another study, Steele and Aronson (1995) found that when African American students were asked to indicate their race before they took a math test (a way of activating the stereotype), they performed more poorly than they had on prior exams. In contrast, the scores of white students were not affected by first indicating their race. Steele and Aronson argued that thinking about negative stereotypes relevant to the task you are performing creates stereotype threat, which leads to decreased performance. That is, the negative impact of race on standardized tests may be caused, at least in part, by the performance situation itself. When the threat was present, African American students were negatively influenced by it.

Research has found that the experience of stereotype threat can help explain a wide variety of performance declines among those targeted by negative stereotypes. For instance, when a math task is described as diagnostic of intelligence, Latinos and particularly Latinas perform more poorly than do whites (Gonzales et al., 2002). Similarly, when stereotypes are activated, children with low socioeconomic status perform more poorly in math than do those with high socioeconomic status, and psychology students perform more poorly than do natural science students (Brown et al., 2003). Even groups who typically enjoy advantaged social status can experience stereotype threat. White men performed more poorly on a math test when they were told that their performance would be compared with that of Asian men (Aronson et al., 1999), and white students performed more poorly than African American students on a sport-related task when it was described to them as measuring their natural athletic ability (Stone, 2002). Stereotype threat is created in situations that pose a significant threat to self-concern, such that our perceptions of ourselves as important, valuable, and capable individuals are threatened. In these situations, there is a discrepancy between our positive concept of our skills and abilities and the negative stereotypes suggesting poor performance. When our stereotypes lead us to believe that we are likely to perform poorly on a task, we experience a feeling of unease and status threat. Stereotype threat is not absolute, and manipulations that affirm positive characteristics about oneself or one’s group successfully reduce stereotype threat (Alter et al., 2010; Greenberg et al., 2003; McIntyre et al., 2003). Just knowing that stereotype threat exists may influence performance and possibly alleviate its adverse impact (Johns et al., 2005).

Contact hypothesis

We learned earlier that one of the reasons that people may hold stereotypes and prejudices is that they view the members of outgroups as different from them. Sometimes we fear that our interactions with people from other racial groups will be unpleasant, and these anxieties may lead us to avoid interacting with people from those groups (Mallett et al., 2008). This suggests that a good way to reduce prejudice is to help people create closer connections with members of different groups. People will behave more favorably toward others when they learn to see others as more similar to them, as nearer to the self, and to be more concerned about them. This idea is known as the contact hypothesis.

Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) conducted a meta-analysis reviewing over 500 studies investigating the effects of intergroup contact on group attitudes. They found that attitudes toward groups that were in contact became more positive over time. Furthermore, the positive impact of contact was found on stereotypes and prejudice, and for many different types of contacted groups. The positive effects of intergroup contact may be partly due to increases in concern for others. Galinsky and Moskowitz (2000) found that leading students to take the perspective of another group member increased empathy and closeness to the person, as well as reduced prejudice.

Student behavior on campuses demonstrates the importance of connecting with others and the dangers of not doing so. Sidanius et al. (2004) found that students who joined exclusive campus groups, including fraternities, sororities, and minority ethnic organizations, were more prejudiced to begin with and became even less connected and more intolerant of members of other social groups over time, as long as they remained in the organizations. One explanation is that memberships in these groups focused the students on themselves and other people very similar to them, making them less tolerant of others who were different.

One large-scale intergroup contact example resulted from the U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which overturned an earlier court ruling and declared state laws establishing separate public schools for African American and white students unconstitutional. As a result, schools had to be integrated, which caused severe political unrest in many states, particularly in the Southern United States. Integrating schools profoundly impacted the racial composition of classrooms, improved educational and occupational achievement of African American students, and increased the desire of African American students to interact with whites by forming cross-race friendships (Stephan, 1999). Overall, desegregating schools in the United States supports the expectation that intergroup contact can successfully change attitudes in the long run. There is substantial support for the effectiveness of intergroup contact in improving group attitudes in various situations, including schools, work organizations, military forces, and public housing.

Although intergroup contact does work, it is not always a cure because the conditions necessary for success are frequently unmet. Contact can be expected to work only in situations that create the appropriate opportunities for change. For one, contact will only be effective if it shows that the existing stereotypes held by the individuals are incorrect. When we learn more about groups that we didn’t know much about before, we learn more of the truth about them, leading us to be less biased in our beliefs; however, if our interactions with the group members do not allow us to learn new beliefs, then contact cannot work.

When we first meet someone from another category, we are likely to rely almost exclusively on our stereotypes (Brodt & Ross, 1998) but when we get to know the individual well (e.g., as a student in a classroom gets to know other students over a school year), we may get to the point where we ignore that individual’s group membership almost completely, responding to them entirely at the individual level (Madon et al., 1998). In this way, contact is effective partly because it leads us to get past our perceptions of others as group members and see them as people.

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