The cultural convergence of Korean immigrants in Hawaii: an empirical test of a mathematical theory.

This paper presents a conceptual model developed by human-communication researchers that provides a description of human cultural and cognitive processes. The processes are at once useful, informative, quantitative, and compatible with the emerging thermodynamic models of nonequilibrium processes. It uses empirical results of a survey on Korean immigrants in Hawaii to illustrate a mathematical theory of cultural convergence as described by Woelfel (1980), Woelfel and Fink (1980), and Barnett and Kincaid (1983). The convergence model of communication enables cultural processes to be subsumed within the laws of thermodynamics. Together, these models predict that the members of a social system who share information with one another about a given topic will over time develop more similar conceptions of that topic. The main purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis which states that if cultural systems behave according to the law of convergence, then, like the particle suspended by an extended spring, the divergent subculture will tend to converge over time toward the position of maximum negentropy, which is the average (equilibrium) position for the society as a whole.