Cultural Integration and Its Discontents

TLDR

A community’s culture is defined by the preferences and equilibrium behaviours of its members, and contacts among communities alter individual cultures through behavioural adaptations driven by coordination pay‑offs and preference changes shaped by socialization and self‑persuasion. The paper investigates how cross‑cultural contacts promote cultural hybridization by modelling continuous variations in preferences and behaviours. The authors use a continuous‑time model of cultural integration that captures both behavioural adaptations and preference changes to analyze the conditions for hybridization. The analysis shows that policies supporting social integration homogenize preferences across communities, undermining multiculturalism, while also revealing that communities benefit when others adjust their behaviours.

Abstract

A community's culture is defined by the preferences and equilibrium behaviours of its members. Contacts among communities alter individual cultures through two interrelated mechanisms: behavioural adaptations driven by pay-offs to coordination, and preference changes shaped by socialization and self-persuasion. This paper explores the workings of these mechanisms through a model of cultural integration in which preferences and behaviours vary continuously. It identifies a broad set of conditions under which cross-cultural contacts promote cultural hybridization. The analysis suggests that policies to support social integration serve to homogenize preferences across communities, thereby undermining a key objective of multiculturalism. Yielding fresh insights into strategies pursued to influence cultural trends, it also shows that communities benefit from having other communities adjust their behaviours.