The individual as "melting pot": The flexibility of bicultural self-construals

New views of biculturalism have transformed the "melting pot" vision of American culture to one in which immigrants are encouraged to maintain multicultural diversity rather than assimilate to the dominant culture. Indeed, the marker of bicultural competence is now seen as the ability to display culturally appropriate behaviors in both the new and old cultural settings (e.g., LaFramboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). Recent social cognitive research emphasizing both the shifting nature of the self (e.g., Gardner, Gabriel, & Lee, 1999) and of cultural world-views (e.g., Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000) can illuminate the mechanisms underlying this more dynamic form of biculturalism. The current research demonstrated bicultural flexibility by comparing monocultural (European-American) and bicultural (Asian-American) participants' self-construals, values, and responses to social obligations as a function of the situational accessibility of independent and interdependent self-construal. As expected, Asian-Americans appeared more responsive to the primes than their European-American counterparts.