The way people adapt their language and mannerisms across different social settings is known as code switching, and it’s something nearly everyone does to some degree — a professor might explain an essay differently to a middle schooler than to a graduate student. But for people facing marginalization, code switching can also serve as a way to avoid bias. Black Americans, for example, may shift between features of African American English and what’s often called “Standardized English” depending on the setting.

Much of the existing research on this subject has focused on how other groups perceive Black Americans, says former Annenberg School for Communication Ph.D. student Darin Johnson, now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. He wanted to flip that focus: “how Black Americans are seeing ourselves, and how that relates to our own understandings of how we’re communicating and existing.”

Identity, Stereotype Threat, and the Desire to Belong

Johnson and his Annenberg colleagues surveyed Black Americans to examine whether the centrality of Black identity or American identity to a person’s sense of self correlated with how much they reported code switching, and what social factors drove that behavior. Their findings are published in Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology.

“We saw that people’s perceptions of their Black identity were related to their perception of how much they tend to switch,” said Annenberg professor Emily Falk, the paper’s senior author, adding that the same was not true of participants’ sense of American identity.

The researchers also found that the more concerned someone was about confirming a negative stereotype of Black Americans — known as stereotype threat — the more likely they were to report code switching. Participants self-reported how often they worried they might appear to be confirming stereotypes related to how they talked or dressed. “The unchallenged stereotypes that people have about others, in tandem with inequitable policies and cultural practices, might constrain how people are navigating their daily lives, their social lives, and the workplace,” Johnson said. “I think it’s really important to have that connective tissue between oppressive systems, interpersonal biases, and individual behaviors.”

Belonging Cuts Both Ways

Participants with a greater desire for belonging were more likely to report code switching, but the more socially connected someone actually felt — relating to others and participating in a group, for instance — the less likely they were to report it. Both assimilationist ideologies, the belief that Black Americans should align with mainstream culture, and nationalist ideologies, which emphasize the distinctiveness of Black American culture, were associated with increased code switching. Notably, the tendency to take others’ perspectives and express empathy, called mentalizing, was not associated with code switching at all.

These findings matter, the researchers note, because code switching can take a real psychological toll. Past research has shown that demands for code switching in the workplace can add cognitive labor, hinder performance, and contribute to burnout. “The racialized context of identity in the United States puts certain kinds of demands on some people more than others,” Falk said.

The authors note that their work “may prove useful for creating and, particularly, testing the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce the necessity of code switching to avoid bias.”

The study, “Psychological Correlates of Self-Reported Code Switching Among Black Americans,” was published in Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology (DOI: 10.1037/cdp0000807) and was supported by Hopelab.