Concepts are also assumed to be activated by external stimuli. The presence of schemas does not mean that they influence cognition in a continuous fashion in all cases. Whether a schema is influential or not depends on the principles of availability, accessibility, salience, and applicability . Availability refers to storing associative information in memory. In order for a schema to potentially influence thought and behavior, it first has to be stored in memory . For instance, a person who plays baseball on a regular basis has stored in memory the rules of the game and the particular behaviors associated with baseball such as swing, hit the ball, and run versus finding themselves in a novel situation such as playing cricket for which they have no available information to govern their thoughts and behaviors. Accessibility refers to how easily a concept comes to mind. When a concept is more accessible it can be quickly activated and used in a particular situation. For example,drainage pot if someone is in a pool then the concept of swimming is readily accessible relative to the concept of walking. Saliency refers to the extent to which particular features of a concept stand out in the associative network relative to other features.
For instance, a woman in a room with 10 men indicates that the women’s features stand out relative to the men. Applicability refers to the particular fit between the concepts in the associative network and incoming information from the environment. For instance, the person playing baseball knows when an opposing teammate throws a ball at he/she that they are supposed to hit the ball with a bat . Individuals have different types of schemas. Of particular interests are self schemas . According to Markus self-schemas refer to “cognitive generalizations of the self, derived from past experiences, that organize and guide the processing of self-related information contained in the individual’s social experiences” In particular, the self-concept is the association between the concept self with one or more attributes . In other words, the structure of the self is a network of associations . Recent work in social cognition has identified the self-concept as a central unit in the structure of social knowledge . There are three major implications of the self-concept. First, information about the self-concept is processed faster and more efficiently, especially consistent information. Second, one retrieves and remembers information that is relevant to one’s self-concept. Third, one will tend to resist information in the environment that is inconsistent with one’s self-concept.
In essence, the social cognition framework provides an alternative approach to investigating acculturation, namely how psychological acculturation operates at an implicit level. To get a better comprehension of how psychological acculturation canoperate implicitly it is important to understand how culture is defined in relation to the self-concept. “Culture” has been traditionally operationalized as a contextual variable in cross cultural psychology. That is to say, it is often defined at the macro level as being outside of and apart from the individual . However, over the last two decades a new perspective, called “cultural psychology,” stemmed from the conceptual and methodological limitations of linking the concept of culture to the individual, a trend that dominated the traditional cross-cultural psychology perspective. Cultural psychology views culture from within rather than apart from the individual and examines how it influences actions, feelings, and thoughts. In other words, culture and the individual are seen as interdependent rather than as independent entities . Both of these approaches to culture have their strengths and weaknesses, but what is apparent about the cultural psychology studies that have been conducted over the past decade that goes beyond the cross-cultural perspective is a firm declaration that “culture is a key determinant of what is means to be a person” .
According to Hong and colleagues culture, as defined within the individual, is based upon two premises. First, culture is internalized as a loose network of specific systems of meaning which are activated by the context. Second, individuals contain, within themselves, multiple cultural meaning systems some of which may be contradictory to others. Based upon these two premises, culture can exist within the individual as a network of specific knowledge structure domains and a single individual can have various cultural meaning systems . Clearly, this type of research suggests that culture should not only be conceptualized as a situational/contextual variable which exists outside of the individual, but also at a psychological level. That is, culture can also be seen as a sociocognitive variable that exists within the individual. Capitalizing on this recent literature, psychological acculturation can be thought of as two types of associative networks of cultural information both of which can influence an individual’s self-concept, which are shaped through repeated experiences and interactions. The bidimensional model of psychological acculturation shows that culture is a multidimensional phenomenon rather than a singular construct recorded invariantly across minds. In considering culture as an integrated and highly general knowledge structure that entails relying on it continuously perhaps makes it too easy to reject the substantial influence of culture on individuals. Cultural perceptions vary across individuals and reflect the fact that individuals have unique, personal experiences of their cultural context . To better understand this phenomena perhaps it is best to use Rohner’s metaphor that compares culture to a game and people as the players . In particular, players have the choice of picking from various strategies and options, and perhaps at times even violating the rules if it serves their individual needs and purposes. That is, the degree to which individuals follow the rules varies from person to person, depending on their personal moods, preferences, and specific social context. This will often result in a great deal of within-culture heterogeneity and individual differences in the extent to which people endorse, internalize, and utilize particular rules that serve their own interests . Since culture varies across individuals within a given context, the way in which cultural information is processed from our environment is not entirely dependent on an integrated domain-general knowledge structure that entails relying on it continuously. In other words, cultural information which is cognitively processed from our environment employs bits and pieces from our ‘cultural toolbox’ to influence thoughts and behaviors.
To corroborate this fact, Hong and colleagues showed that cultural information is processed using only a small subset of an individual’s schematic knowledge structure. This subset comes to the forefront and guides the interpretation of a given environmental stimulus within bicultural individuals. The manner in which cultural information is processed is very important to consider. Recent research in social cognition has revealed a variety of dual-systems models that distinguish between how information is processed implicitly,drainage planter pot impulsively or associatively versus explicitly, reflective, or propositionally . These models suggest the extent to which implicit and explicit experiences operate independently or interactively. One important note about dual-system models is the term implicit. Implicit is often used to mean a lack of awareness or unconsciousness and includes self-regulatory processes meant to inhibit an unwarranted response . Thus, the term “implicit” refers to processes that occur outside of conscious awareness and without conscious control . According to Strack and Deitsch’s dual-systems model, thinking, and behavior are functions of two different systems of information processing, namely the reflective and the impulsive systems. In particular, the reflective system suggests that behavior is the result of propositional reasoning. For example, thinking about one’s life may lead to the conclusion “I am joyful”. Using this type of reasoning makes information accessible in the form of propositions. Propositions consist of concepts that are linked by a relation . These propositions are usually produced through introspection. The impulsive system, on the other hand, processes information by the spread of activation between concepts that are associatively linked . Associative links are activated spontaneously and are only indirectly accessible by introspection. A common assumption of research on psychological acculturation is that it involves conscious representations of the self-concept that are generated through an introspective reasoning process of propositions. Individuals are viewed as playing a consciously active role in ascribing meaning, implementing choices, pursuing goals, or initiating actions. This assumption often leads to the belief that psychological acculturation could only be examined through the process of proposition reasoning. However, research on the dual-systems model would suggest otherwise. The differences between the evaluation of implicit and explicit self-concepts should be understood in terms of their underlying mental processes . The implicit self-concept reflects automatic responses which result from the particular associations that are triggered automatically when a person encounters a relevant stimulus. The explicit self-concept, on the other hand, is best considered as evaluative judgments about the self-concept which stem from the processes of propositional reasoning.
Based on the common assumption and practice that psychological acculturation involves examining the explicit self-concept through the process of proposition reasoning, it has often been examined via questionnaires which ask respondents to describe their acculturation experiences. Although examining acculturation using a questionnaire methodology is widely accepted and a valid way to assess the topic, there are two limitations which need be addressed. First, questionnaire answers only refer to representations of the explicit self-concept that are accessible through introspection. Not all knowledge, beliefs, or attitudes of an individual are necessarily privy to introspection . Therefore, self-reports do not provide an accurate assessment of people’s thoughts and behaviors. Second, questionnaire answers are vulnerable to self-presentational biases such as social desirability, impression management, or demand characteristics. Even though self presentations biases have not been systematically evaluated in the acculturation literature, Rudmin warns us that self-report of acculturation experiences may be affected by normative demands and response bias. Due to the limitations of self-report measures and research on dual-systems model, there is a need to have access to procedures that are not restricted to these limits of explicit questionnaire measures and which are appropriate for the assessment of implicit representations of the self-concept. Over the past decade, progress has been made with the development of these implicit measures, particularly the Implicit Associate Test . The IAT’s main purpose is to measure the relative strength of automatic associations between mental representations of concepts. A basic assumption of the IAT is that if two concepts are highly associated, the sorting task will be easier when the two associated concepts share the same response key than when they share different response keys. The IAT is usually administered in a block of several trials. A trial is a one-word presentation, whereas a block is a series of trials where the category decisions are the same throughout a block. Most commonly, one IAT session consists of seven blocks, however, the number of blocks that determine one IAT session may vary depending upon the purpose of the research. An example of how the IAT works, using seven blocks, is as follows. In the first block, participants are instructed to match an item with the appropriate concept as quickly as possible. In a second block, participants are asked to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant attributes or traits such as love and death. Thereafter, the two concepts are then paired with the pleasant or unpleasant attributes or traits . For the remaining blocks, the positions of the words are counterbalanced . The degree of association between two concepts is measured by the differences in response time to compatible and incompatible blocks. In recent years there has been much criticism in regards to what the IAT actually measures. Critics contend that the IAT measures associations that reside in the cultural environment, rather than in the person . However, proponents argue that it measures individual differences . To support this argument, Nosek and Hansen showed that the IAT has little to no relationship with cultural knowledge after accounting for common variations in explicit measures. Critics argue that a problem with the Nosek and Hansen methodology was that extrapersonal associations were used as evaluative components to measure the IAT-cultural knowledge relationship, when indeed it should be measured using a more personalized procedural approach . For example, the extrapersonal attribute-pair of pleasant/unpleasant words were associated with concept-pairs such as Black American-White American , Peanuts-Shellfish , John Kerry-George Bush , and Candy BarApple . What should have been used was a more personalized procedural approach that included personalized attribute-pairs such as I Like/I Dislike. To test this proposition, Nosek and Hansen conducted a second set of experiments to see if the IAT has any relationship with cultural knowledge after accounting for personalized changes in IAT procedures.