Psychology Commons^™

Divided Loyalties: Identity Integration And Cultural Cues Predict Ingroup Favoritism Among Biculturals, Chi-Ying Cheng, Kathrin J. Hanek, Annick C. Odom, Fiona Lee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

How do biculturals, or individuals who identify with more than one culture, manage their loyalties between two cultural ingroups? We argue that this process is moderated by Bicultural Identity Integration (BII), or individual differences in perceived conflict between two cultural identities. Two quasi-experiments examined biculturals’ preferences for two competing groups, each representing one of their cultural identities, in response to cultural primes. In Study 1, we found that Flemish-Belgian biculturals with low BII, or those who perceive their cultural identities as conflicting, favored the primed cultural group less than the unprimed cultural group. In Study 2, we found the same …