Vasquez‐Salgado, Ramirez, & Greenfield / / June 2018
Around the world, people migrate from poorer countries with less educational opportunity to richer ones with greater educational opportunity. In this journey, they bring their family obligation values into societies that value individual achievement. This process can create home–school cultural value conflict—conflict between family and academic obligations—for the children of Latina/o immigrants who attend universities in the United States. We hypothesised that this conflict causes cognitive disruption. One‐hundred sixty‐one Latina/o first‐generation university students (called college students in the United States) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental prompts; thereafter, the students engaged in an attentional control task (i.e., the Stroop test). For Latina/o students living close to home, prompting a home–school cultural value conflict was more deleterious to attentional control than the other conditions.
