ArticlePloS one2018
Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conformity to popular, not average, opinions: Models, data, and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Understanding the differences in occupational injuries due to accidents among native-born and immigrant workers in Sweden: a repeated cross-sectional register-based study.Injury epidemiology · 2025Article
- Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2025Review
- Weak individual preferences stabilize culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Postmarital residence rules and transmission pathways in cultural hitchhiking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Investigating the relevance of the advanced activities of daily living tool for the screening and diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment and dementia to the Sub-Saharan African migrant population in Belgium: A qualitative focus group study.The British journal of occupational therapy · 2024Article
- Migrants from Ukraine in the Polish labour market as perceived by Poles from rural areas and towns.PloS one · 2024Article
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Mendelian randomisation study of body composition and depression in people of East Asian ancestry highlights potential setting-specific causality.BMC medicine · 2023Article
- Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Review
- Do Migration and Acculturation Impact Somatization? A Scoping Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Impact of cultural and genetic structure on food choices along the Silk Road.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Self-Care of African Immigrant Adults with Chronic Illness.Clinical nursing research · 2022Article
- Article
- The interplay of migration and cultural similarity between countries: Evidence from Facebook data on food and drink interests.PloS one · 2022Article
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Dynamic social learning in temporally and spatially variable environments.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Cultural evolution of conformity and anticonformity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How do migration and acculturation (i.e. psychological or behavioral change resulting from migration) affect within- and between-group cultural variation? Here I address this question by drawing analogies between genetic and cultural evolution. Population genetic models show that migration rapidly breaks down between-group genetic structure. In cultural evolution, however, migrants or their descendants can acculturate to local behaviors via social learning processes such as conformity, potentially preventing migration from eliminating between-group cultural variation. An analysis of the empirical literature on migration suggests that acculturation is common, with second and subsequent migrant generations shifting, sometimes substantially, towards the cultural values of the adopted society. Yet there is little understanding of the individual-level dynamics that underlie these population-level shifts. To explore this formally, I present models quantifying the effect of migration and acculturation on between-group cultural variation, for both neutral and costly cooperative traits. In the models, between-group cultural variation, measured using F statistics, is eliminated by migration and maintained by conformist acculturation. The extent of acculturation is determined by the strength of conformist bias and the number of demonstrators from whom individuals learn. Acculturation is countered by assortation, the tendency for individuals to preferentially interact with culturally-similar others. Unlike neutral traits, cooperative traits can additionally be maintained by payoff-biased social learning, but only in the presence of strong sanctioning mechanisms (e.g. institutions). Overall, the models show that surprisingly little conformist acculturation is required to maintain realistic amounts of between-group cultural diversity. While these models provide insight into the potential dynamics of acculturation and migration in cultural evolution, they also highlight the need for more empirical research into the individual-level learning biases that underlie migrant acculturation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.