US Immigrants Get Fat To Fit In
It is a bit ironic: While Americans look at Mediterranean and Asian cuisine to live healthier and lose weight, immigrants to the US switch to American-style eating to show they fit in.
“You Eat That?”
Researchers surveyed Asian-American and Caucasian college students about their experiences with food during childhood. Of the Asian-Americans, 68% recalled embarrassing situations when eating around non-Asian peers. High on the list were feeling awkwardness about using chopsticks and having to eat parts of an animal that Caucasians often consider disgusting – fish eyes, chicken feet and pork head.
In comparison, only 27% of the white respondents remembered situations where they felt as awkward about eating in front of others.
Judging Americanness
After this preliminary survey, two studies were conducted, each having a condition to make Asian-Americans feel insecure about their “Americanness”.
In the first study, a white researcher requested Asian-American participants to write down their favorite foods, after asking half of them if they spoke English. In the second, Asian-Americans were given the task to select something to eat from the menu of either an Asian or American restaurant, but before being given this request, some of them were told that they “have to be an American to be in this study”.
Shoppers at an Asian supermarket
The results were interesting: 75% of those Asian-Americans asked about their English skills mentioned a typical American food as their favorite dish, compared to only 25% in those whose skills weren’t questioned. For Caucasians the question made no difference in their preferences. And 60% of the Asian-Americans who were told that “only Americans” can participate in that study chose items from the American restaurant’s menu.
Detailed results will be published in the June issue of Psychological Science, but Maya Guendelman, Sapna Cheryan and Benoit Monin, the researchers behind these studies and themselves immigrants, already said that participants who felt threatened about their status on average consumed 182 kcal more, just to prove that they belong.
The Pressure To Fit In
It is not only immigrants who make unwise decisions based on what others will think about them – we all are prone to it, because we don’t exist in a vacuum and want to fit in.
If you are a college student, you are more likely to heavily drink on weekends if your friends engage in binge drinking as well. If you are a stay-at-home mom and nobody in your social circle works out, then you can’t help feeling ridiculous if you want to try it. And if your buddies on the football team do steroids, it hurts when they tell you you are a snob, because you don’t want to.
To conform is a lubricant that often works in our advantage, because it keeps society as a whole running. When you never saw a red light in your life, it’s a good idea to ape those around you, that wait for that light to turn green. But sometimes it also does pay to question what you do and why you do it.
Pictures courtesy of Darren Kim and epsos.de.
2 Comments
I remember talking about this with a Chinese graduate student while jogging. He went on to tell me that his relatives in China had adumbrated his inevitable weight gain, for they even thousands of miles away believed that most Americans were gluttons. And even though he was very successful academically, he was now somewhat of a big, fat failure in their eyes, no pun intended.
What your entire article bespeaks of is conforming to societal norms, which, in layman’s terms, is behaving and thinking in acceptable ways in order to maintain positive social status.
There are two types of conformity to societal norms: (1) Public – superficial change in overt behavior; (2) Private – Actual change in beliefs. And so given that the experiment was cross sectional in nature (e.g., measurements were taking at one point in time), it’s very hard to say whether or not the numbers are accurate, for, in this case, there was probably a great deal of social desirability bias.
For instance, although Asian Americans may report that they like American food and may even eat a little bit more when around those to whose group the wish to belong, it still remains unclear whether they’re taking those norms to heart so to speak. And so the question remains: At the end of the day, do they revert back to their traditional eating habits or are they still enamored of their favorite American foods.
What’s needed in order to definitively say what’s happening is a longitudinal study, for some possible mitigating factors not taken into account, in addition to the aforementioned public vs. private conformity dichotomy, are: (1) Strength – importance of the group; (2) Immediacy – how close the group is to you in space and time; and (3) Number – referring to how many people are in the group.
If Jonny Chan Smith is surrounded by Asian friends, he will still behave like an Asian. On the other hand, if he is anything like the person whom I mentioned earlier, yes, he will have to conform or be lonely in foreign land, and what could be worse than that?
Schmidty, thanks for this insightful comment, as it also highlights one of the pressures immigrants are under: to conform to the norms of their new home country while simultaneously trying to stay integrated in the social setting they come from. Losing one or the other can prove fatal.
I faintly remember one study looking at Hispanic immigrants, where rising rates of obesity where reported the longer these people lived in the US.
It may be a question of how far a group is assimilated, which may differ depending on culture of origin.