This study presents the concordance model of acculturation (CMA), which was developed with reference to Berry’s acculturation model (Berry, 1997). A comparison of the attitudes of a dominant and a non-dominant group gives rise to four levels of concordance that represent different possibilities of (mis)matched attitudes: consensual, culture-problematic, contact-problematic, and conflictual. A basic assumption of the CMA is that the greater the mismatch in attitudes, the more threatening and less enriching the intergroup situation will be perceived to be. This assumption was tested in a survey study comparing the attitudes of Germans ( N = 265) with the attitudes they imputed to Polish or Italian immigrants. We were able to show that the level of concordance is related to perceived intergroup threat and/or enrichment when controlling for the underlying acculturation attitudes: the greater the concordance between the dominant group’s acculturation attitudes and the attitudes imputed to immigrants, the lower the perceived threat and the higher the perceived enrichment.

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The authors expected the extent to which host community members (a) perceive immigrants as threatening, (b) believe that the immigrants are able to assimilate to the host community (permeability), and (c) consider their presence in the host community as legitimate to predict attitudes towards immigrant acculturation. The authors designed Study 1 to examine attitudes of Germans toward Turkish immigrants. Participants were 227 German white-collar and blue-collar workers. As expected, ethnocentric acculturation attitudes positively correlated with perceived threat and negatively correlated with perceived legitimacy and perceived permeability. However, only perceived threat contributed uniquely to the prediction of the attitudes. In Study 2, the authors applied an experimental manipulation of perceived threat. Before answering attitude questions, participants read magazine articles with a threatening, enriching, or irrelevant content. The manipulation had the predicted impact on the self-reported attitudes toward immigrants. However, the salience of threatening or enriching aspects of the Turkish culture did not affect implicitly measured attitudes.

Recent research has shown that the perspectives of both minorities and majorities should be taken into account to reach a deeper understanding of the acculturation process and its consequences for intergroup relations. The authors report two experiments that investigated the impact of discordant acculturation attitudes on perceived threat. In Study 1 (N=183), Germans were asked for their attitudes toward Turks and Italians. Different levels of concordance of acculturation attitudes were induced by presenting participants with newspaper articles describing the acculturation attitude of the respective out-group and perceived threat was measured. In Study 2 (N=100), two fictitious immigrant groups were used as target groups. Results in both studies showed that discordance of acculturation attitudes leads to higher perceptions of intergroup threat than concordance of acculturation attitudes. Furthermore, both studies supported the assumption that a similar out-group is perceived as less threatening than a dissimilar out-group.