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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