Does Culture Matter for Assimilation?

As I was reading this book, I kept asking myself: can people from any cultural background or race assimilate to Western values? Lawrence Mead, a professor at New York University who provided much of the supporting research and rationale for welfare reform in the 1990s, maintains the popular conservative belief that individuals from all cultures can be socialized into Western culture. But Mead is not typical in his insistence that the psychology of Westerners is fundamentally different from the psychology of non-Western peoples. The primary differences between individuals has less to do with the degree to which their external conditions differ than with the extent to which they have internalized attitudes that encourage intellectual autonomy and goal setting. The peoples of the non-Western world have “a more passive mind-set.” But what makes Mead really untypical for an academic (really almost