Living Between Worlds: Exploring the Fluctuations of Cultural Dissonance in Daily Life
As the world grows in cultural diversity, so too does the prevalence of experiencing cultural dissonance, defined as the psychological tension that results from reconciling ingrained cultural expectations with a fundamentally different cultural environment. As opposed to previous research defining cultural tensions as persistent and ethnically exclusive, this project explored the daily fluctuations of cultural dissonance - measured as changes in cultural feelings, cognition, and behavior - for Cornell University students (N=97) using experience sampling methods (ESM). Multilevel modeling was used to analyze how daily variables of environmental comfort and comfort with others, and person-level predictors of sociocultural adaptation, cultural identity strength, and derailment impacted the outcome variables. While findings were weak, results showed consistent importance of environmental and person-level comfort on cultural dissonance, underscoring the importance of situational circumstances on changes in cultural dissonance, and a need for further research with targeted hypotheses and more defined measures.