Rethinking Acculturation: Placing Social Interaction at the Center of Cultural Adaptation

Acculturation is a complex and ongoing process that involves psychological, social, and cultural adaptation as individuals navigate new environments. To better capture its dynamic nature, we propose a shift from viewing acculturation as solely an individual-level adjustment to understanding it as a socially embedded and interaction-driven phenomenon. Building on recent insights from interacting minds, cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and cultural psychology, we examine how shared cultural meanings are formed and reshaped through everyday interactions between immigrants and non-immigrant residents. We also emphasize the importance of methodological innovation, including naturalistic paradigms, social network analysis, and computational simulations in disentangling the complicated mechanisms underlying acculturation. In addition, by extending the scope of inquiry to less frequently studied migratory flows across regions beyond the classical East-West framework, future work should call for more globally attuned and multidimensional models of cultural adaptation. Together, these perspectives offer a path toward a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of acculturation processes.