THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF CULTURAL RETOOLING

An essential challenge of cultural adaptation is to smoothly and swiftly incorporate new behaviors into one's cultural repertoire. I introduce the term cultural retooling to capture this process and provide a theory of its psychological dynamics. Using longitudinal data from 50 foreign-born master's degree students in the United States, I find that individuals use two core methods for addressing the internal conflict that they experience during cultural retooling (integrative and instrumental) and that the retooling process itself unfolds over three distinct phases (conflict, ambivalence, and authenticity). Moreover, I find that individuals vary in their trajectories across these phases (regressing, stagnating, or transforming) and that these trajectories are shaped by how internal conflict is addressed.