Do immigration and social media facilitate or inhibit cognitive acculturation? The role of individual dialecticism in dual-focused cultural stimuli evaluation

Social media and immigration influence individuals' acculturation experiences. Studies that compare the influences of immigration-based versus social media-based acculturation on cognition are limited. By focusing on acculturalization in Chinese individuals (migrant versus social media users) and through two studies, this research examines whether two types of acculturation experience have different degrees of impact on Chinese individuals' dialectical thinking– the tendency to tolerate contradictions – in predicting the evaluation of dual cultural stimuli. Both studies collected data using experiments on participants in China and the United Kingdom. Study 1 shows that low dialectical Chinese, who acculturated as a result of immigration, exhibit better attitudes toward the dual cultural stimuli than their high dialectical Chinese counterparts. Individuals who acculturated as a result of social media (technology-based communication) show no differences in their attitudes toward the dual cultural stimuli on the basis of dialecticism. Study 2 shows that dialecticism can be primed through the language used in the stimuli, with Chinese individuals who acculturated as a result of immigration reporting higher dialecticism and lower evaluations for dual cultural stimuli. The switching effects of individual dialecticism were not evidenced within the social media-based acculturation group. Implications and future research are discussed.