Culture and self

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Culture and self

• Independent and interdependent self-construals

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Overview of topic

• Theories of culture and self
• Some relevant findings
• Embarrassability
• Self-esteem and self-enhancement
• Some key critiques

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Theories of culture and self
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Why study cultural differences?

• The Western conception of the person as a
  bounded, unique, more or less integrated
  motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic
  center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and
  action organized into a distinctive whole and set
  contrastively both against other such wholes and
  against a social and natural background is,
  however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather
  peculiar idea within the context of the worlds
  cultures. (Geertz, 1975, p. 48)

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Triandis (1989)

• Distinguishes private, public collective selves
• private traits, states, behaviours
• public generalised others view of self
• collective groups view of self/social identity
• Three dimensions of cross-cultural variation
• individualism-collectivism (private vs.
  collective)
• tightness-looseness (public, collective vs.
  private)
• simplicity-complexity (public, collective vs.
  private)

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Individualism-collectivism

• Individualism the conception of individuals as
  autonomous from groups
• Collectivism the conception of individuals as
  aspects of groups or collectives
• (Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao Sinha, 1995, p.
  462)

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American/Chinese self-concept

• Trafimow, Triandis Goto (1991) studied the
  self-concept among 24 North American and 18
  Chinese students at the University of Illinois
• Coded TST responses into idiocentric (private),
  allocentric (public), group (collective) selves
• All students gave more idiocentric than group
  responses, but North American students gave more
  idiocentric and less group responses in
  comparison with Chinese students

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The theory of self-construals

• Markus Kitayama (1991)
• Review paper which defines area
• Cited over 1000 times!
• Central idea
• Eastern and Western cultures differ in
  relative prevalence of independent and
  interdependent self-construals

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Independent self-construal

• Achieving the cultural goal of independence
  requires construing oneself as an individual
  whose behavior is organized and made meaningful
  primarily by reference to ones own internal
  repertoire of thoughts, feelings and action,
  rather than by reference to the thoughts,
  feelings and actions of others. (Markus
  Kitayama, 1991, p. 226)

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Interdependent self-construal

• Experiencing interdependence entails seeing
  oneself as part of an encompassing social
  relationship and recognizing that ones behavior
  is determined, contingent on, and, to a large
  extent organized by what the actor perceives to
  be the thoughts, feelings, and actions of
  others in the relationship. (Markus
  Kitayama,1991, p. 227)

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Self-construals
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Implications for cognition

• Compared to Americans, South-East Asian
  participants typically show
• more interpersonal knowledge
• more context-specific knowledge of self and
  other
• more attention to interpersonal context in basic
  cognition

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Implications for emotion

• Ego-focused emotions
• anger, frustration, pride
• predicted to be more important in US
• Other-focused emotions
• sympathy, feelings of interpersonal communion,
  shame
• predicted to be more important in Japan

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Implications for motivation

• Self-expression or self-restraint
• Bases of achievement
• Self-enhancement or modesty

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Some relevant findings
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Self-construal and embarrassability

• Study by Singelis and Sharkey (1995)
• Participants
• 86 Euro-American and 417 Asian-American (Chinese,
  Filipino, Japanese, Korean) university students
• Questionnaire measures
• Self-construal scale (Singelis, 1994)
• Embarrassability scale (Modigliani, 1968)

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Ethnocultural group differences

• Significant ethnocultural group differences in
  embarrassability (p lt .001, R2 4.5)
• Generally, Asian-Americans were more susceptible
  to embarrassment than were Euro-Americans
• Significant group differences in independent (p
  lt .001, R2 6.7) and interdependent (p lt .01,
  R2 3.4) self-construals
• Asian-Americans reported less independent and
  more interdependent self-construals than did
  Euro-Americans

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Self-construal and embarrassability

• Independent and interdependent self-construals
  were both significant predictors of
  susceptibility to embarrassment (p lt .001, R2
  19)
• However, after controlling for self-construals,
  ethnocultural group membership did not predict
  embarrassability (p gt .05, partial R2 0.7)
• Intepreted as evidence for mediation
• Culture ? self-construal ? embarrassability

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Self-esteem across cultures

• Self-enhancement in Western cultures
• Self-criticism (modesty) in Eastern cultures
• Heine et al. (1999) review paper Is there a
  universal need for positive self-regard?
• Evidence for self-criticism rather than
  self-enhancement effects among Asian populations
  (see e.g. Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto
  Norasakkunkit, 1997)
• Asian populations show lower levels of
  self-esteem than do North Americans

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Self-esteem across cultures
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Self-esteem across cultures
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Self-esteem across cultures
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Constructions of self-esteem

• Relationship esteem
• Need for face
• Need to do ones best
• Temporal/situational differences
• Need to be a good cultural member

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Collectivist self-enhancement?

• Sedikides, Gaertner Toguchi (2003)

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Some key critiques
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Critiques 1 Kim

• Collectivism is more about relatedness of
  individuals than about subordination of
  individuality to group memberships
• Three modes of collectivism
• Undifferentiated
• Relational
• Coexistence

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Critiques 2 Spiro

• Argues Markus Kitayama (and others) are
  misreading anthropology
• Different meanings of self
• Flawed comparisons
• Evidence for much independence in East and
  interdependence in West

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Critiques 3 Matsumoto

• Theoretically, self-construals explain
  cross-national differences in cognition, emotion,
  motivation (and behaviour)
• Most research does not test this assertion
• Evidence does not support this assertion

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Critiques 4 Hermans Kempen

• Perils of cultural dichotomies
• What about change?
• What about mobility?
• What about communication between cultures?
• What about diversity within cultures?
• Culture is not the same as nation

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Conclusions

• Cross-cultural differences in the self-concept
  provide a fruitful area of research for examining
  social constructionist ideas.
• The precise nature and distribution of these
  differences remains a matter of debate.
• The motivation to maintain and enhance
  self-esteem may vary in strength across cultures
  or may vary in how self-esteem is constructed.