From discrimination to identity integration: the mediating role of ethnic and national identities

Racial and ethnic minority (REM) immigrants most often identify both with their ethnic group of origin (i.e., ethnic identity) and their receiving society (i.e., national identity; Sam & Berry, 2006). Bicultural identity integration (BII) describes the degree to which these two identities exist in harmony (vs. conflict) and are blended (vs. compartmentalized; Huynh et al., 2018). Ethnicity-based discrimination by race/ethnic majority members may lead to stronger ethnic identity and weaker national identity (i.e., rejection-dis/identification; Branscombe et al., 1999; Jasinskaja-Lahti et al., 2009) and less bicultural identity harmony (Huynh et al., 2018) among REM immigrants. Given the documented relations between bicultural identity harmony and ethnic/national identity (Huynh et al., 2018; Tikhonov et al., 2019), I tested whether ethnicity-based discrimination would lead to increased discordance between ethnic and national identity commitment and if this increased discordance would mediate the association between ethnicity-based discrimination and bicultural identity harmony. Two hundred and seventy-four, first and second-generation REM immigrants to the U.S. were either included in or excluded from a game of Cyberball, an online ball tossing game by two gender and age matched “Players” (i.e., bots in actuality) described as White American/Caucasian. Contrary to what I had hypothesized, participants in the exclusion condition did not score higher on a measure of ethnic identity commitment and lower on national identity commitment and bicultural identity harmony relative to those in the inclusion condition. Furthermore, a cultural identity commitment discordance score did not mediate the relation between experimental condition and bicultural identity harmony. However, a significant limitation of this study was a majority of participants indicating that they were aware of playing Cyberball with bots and not actual human beings.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference