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.

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?