Institutional Cultural Norms, Cultural Motives for College and Adjustment: Cultural Mismatch Theory in the Chinese Context

Cultural mismatch theory attempts to explain how the independent, middle-class culture of U.S. higher education may inadvertently contribute to creating and maintaining social class inequalities for students from interdependently oriented, working-class background. The current research was the first attempt to examine the theory’s cross-cultural applicability in the Chinese context. Validating the main claims of cultural mismatch theory, more selective Chinese universities endorsed significantly more independent values but similar interdependent values as their less-selective counterparts (Study 1), and first-generation college students endorsed significantly more interdependent motives for college than their continuing-generation counterparts (Studies 2, 3). Somewhat different from prior findings in the U.S., which found holding interdependent models of self to robustly predict negative outcomes, results revealed nuanced cultural advantage for holding independent models of self for Chinese students in terms of lower depression (Study 2) and higher daily sense of fit over a 2-week span (Study 3). The Chinese university culture did not seem to exert unequal cultural barriers through a lack of interdependent norms, but an overemphasis of independent norms. The cross-cultural perspective helps contextualize institutionalized cultural mismatch in the culture of the larger society.