15 Dialecticism and the future self in cultural contexts: Relation to well-being

Recent research indicates that people from multiracial backgrounds may have more malleable racial identification than those with monoracial backgrounds. For multiracial individuals, context may play an important role in racial self-identification. An Asian/White biracial person, for example, might identify more as Asian when around other Asian people or when speaking an Asian language. Also, over one's lifetime, multiracial people are more likely to change their racial identification than keep it constant. But how do these fluctuations in racial self-definition affect psychological well-being? This chapter discusses how individual difference variables, namely dialectical self-views, moderate the effect of racial identity fluctuation on psychological well-being. In particular, it discusses how malleable racial identification predicts lower psychological well-being only for those with less dialectical-self views (i.e., little tolerance for change and inconsistency).