Culture And The Self Research Paper

Discussion begins with a conceptual argument for recognizing the self as cultural. This is followed by a brief overview of research that highlights the existence of cultural differences in the self and considers implications of such variation for related areas of psycho-logical functioning. Finally, attention turns to a consideration of challenges to be met in future work on culture and the self and to the potential contributions of this work to psychological inquiry.

1. Theoretical Premises

The recognition of the self as cultural is premised on core assumptions regarding the nature of psycho-logical functioning and of culture. These assumptions include a conception of the person as self-reflexive and agentic, as well as a view of culture as forming a symbolic medium for human development.

A core assumption held about the self is that universally individuals maintain some awareness of their mental activity, of themselves as existing in time and space, and of their acting in the world. As Hallowell argues:

it seems necessary to assume self-awareness as one of the prerequisite psychological conditions for the functioning of any human social order, no matter what linguistic and culture patterns prevail … the phenomena of self-awareness in our species is as integral a part of human sociocultural model of adaptation as it is a distinctive human level of psychological structuralization (Hallowell 1955, p. 75).

Along with this premise of self-awareness, the assumption is also made that individuals are agentic in actively contributing meanings to experience (Bruner 1990). From this perspective, that emerged with the cognitive revolution in psychology, individuals are understood to go beyond the information given in making sense of experience, rather than merely passively to absorb externally given information.

Also of critical importance to the view of self as culturally grounded has been the understanding of culture as a symbolic medium for human development, that encompasses shared meanings which are embodied in artifacts and practices (Geertz 1973, Shore 1996, Shweder and Levine 1984). Cultures are seen as encompassing knowledge of experience and rules for conduct as well as objects and events that are created, in part, by cultural definition. Importantly, this reality-creating role of culture is recognized to be broad, extending not only to the establishment of institutions (e.g., marriage), roles (e.g., bride), and artifacts (e.g., wedding ring), but also to the creation of psychological concepts and epistemological categories (e.g., commitment, time).

From the present perspective, it is understood that, whereas an involuntary response may proceed without cultural mediation, all higher order psychological processes depend, at least in part, on cultural input for their emergence. As Geertz asserts:

We are … incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves though culture—and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it (Geertz 1973, p. 49).

Thus, for example, whereas involuntary physiological reactions may be elicited by situational events, whether they become interpreted and experienced in emotional terms depends, in part, on such input as culturally based theories regarding the nature, causes, and consequences of emotions, cultural routines for responding to emotions, natural language categories for defining emotions, as well as a range of other sociocultural processes. The present considerations lead to the expectation that qualitative differences in self-conceptions and in related modes of psychological functioning may be emphasized among individuals from cultural communities characterized by contrasting self-related sociocultural meanings and practices.

2. Impact Of Cultural Variation In The Self On Basic Psychological Processes

The present section considers representative examples of empirical studies that embody this core insight regarding the cultural grounding of psychological processes, an insight that is critical to the newly re-emerging theoretical perspective of cultural psycho-logy (e.g., Cole 1990, 1996, Markus et al. 1996, Miller 1997, Shweder 1990, Shweder et al. 1998). Although the overview presented here is necessarily highly selective and incomplete, it serves to illustrate ways in which cultural research on the self is offering new process explanations of psychological phenomena as well as identifying fundamental variability in the forms that psychological phenomena assume.

2.1 Social Attribution And Cognition

In early groundbreaking research, Shweder and Bourne (1984) challenged the completeness of con-temporary psychological theories of social attribution. It was documented that, as compared with European-Americans, Oriyan Indians place significantly greater emphasis in person description on actions as compared with abstract traits, with their person descriptions more frequently making reference to the context. Thus, for example, their research revealed that whereas European-Americans are more likely to de-scribe a friend by saying ‘she is friendly,’ Oriyan Indians are more likely to describe them by saying ‘she brings cakes to my family on festival days.’ This type of cultural difference, it was observed, was not explicable in terms of the types of factors that had been emphasized in previous studies, such as variation in schooling, literacy, socioeconomic status, linguistic resources, or capacities for abstract thought. Rather, the trends were demonstrated to reflect the contrasting cultural conceptions of the person and related socio-cultural practices emphasized in Hindu Indian as compared with European-American cultural com-munities. Subsequent cross-cultural developmental research on social attribution documented that cultural considerations impact as well on the direction of developmental change, with European-American children showing an age increase in their references to traits (e.g., ‘she is aggressive’), and Hindu Indian children showing an age increase in their references to the social context (e.g., ‘there are bad relations between our families’) (Miller 1984). More recently, this type of work has been extended to understanding the development of individuals’ conceptions of mind, with cultural work calling into question claims that theory of mind understandings develop spontaneously toward an endpoint of trait psychology and providing evidence that they proceed in directions that reflect the contrasting epistemological assumptions of local cultural communities (Lillard 1998).

In other lines of work on psychological implications of cultural variation in the self, research is calling into question the universality of various attributional and cognitive tendencies long assumed to be basic to all psychological functioning, such as motives to maintain self-consistency, or to emphasize dispositional over situational information. Thus, for example, it has been shown that Japanese college students tend to maintain weaker beliefs in attitude–behavior consistency than do Australian college students (Kashima et al. 1992), while being less prone than are Canadian college students to show cognitive dissonance biases, i.e., tendencies to distort cognitions to make them more congruent with behavior (Heine and Lehman 1997). Also, relative to European-Americans, various East Asian populations have been documented to display greater sensitivity to situational information in object perception and less vulnerability to the fundamental attribution error, a tendency to treat behaviors as correspondent with dispositions (Ji et al. 2000).

New lines of research in this area are also linking cultural views of the self and related cultural practices to variation in fundamental styles of cognitive processing, such as tendencies to privilege analytic as contrasted with dialectical epistemological stances. In one illustration of such a cultural difference, experimental research has demonstrated that American undergraduates tend to treat information in a polarized manner, as seen in their considering scientific evidence as more plausible when it is presented alone rather than in conjunction with contradictory in-formation. In contrast, Chinese undergraduates tend to process information in ways that involve greater acceptance of opposing viewpoints, as seen in their considering scientific evidence as more plausible when it is presented in conjunction with contradictory information rather than alone (Peng and Nisbett 1999). These types of differences appear linked, at least in part, to contrasting cultural practices, such as the presence of traditions of debate in certain Western cultural settings as compared with their absence in certain East Asian cultural communities.

2.2 Self-Esteem And Well-Being

In the area of the self-concept, cultural work is calling into question the widely held assumption that enhancement of one’s self-image is fundamental to psychological functioning and necessarily yields adaptive advantage. It has been observed, for example, that whereas the open-ended self-descriptions of American adults emphasize positive attributes (Herzog et al. 1998), those of Japanese emphasize either weaknesses or the absence of negative self-characteristics (e.g., ‘I’m somewhat selfish,’ ‘I’m not lazy’). It has also been observed that the scores of Japanese on measures of self-esteem tend to be at or slightly below the scale midpoint, an indication of a tendency to view the self as similar to others (Diener and Diener 1995). This contrasts with the tendency for those of Americans to be higher than the scale midpoints, an indication of a tendency for marked self-enhancement.

Challenging the cross-cultural relevance of the psychological construct of self-esteem, cultural re-search reveals that self-enhancement tendencies do not play as central a role in social functioning in various Asian cultural populations as observed typically among European-Americans ( Heine et al. 1999). For example, whereas self-esteem is found to correlate more strongly with life satisfaction in cultural settings that emphasize individualistic as compared with collectivist meanings and practices, a concern with relationship harmony shows the reverse pattern of correlations (Gabrenya and Hwang 1996).

Highlighting the role of sociocultural institutions and practices in creating and sustaining such self-processes, it has been further documented that European-American behavioral practices tend to be viewed, by both Japanese and European-American populations, as leading to self-esteem enhancement, whereas Japanese behavioral practices tend to be viewed as giving rise to a more self-critical stance (Kitayama et al. 1997). Related types of differences in everyday cultural routines have been documented in research on child socialization. For example, ethnographic work reveals that the stories told by Chinese mothers to their children are more likely to focus on the child’s transgressions whereas those told by European-American mothers are more likely to focus on the child’s accomplishments (Miller et al. 1996). It has likewise been found that both Chinese as well as Japanese mothers tend to be more critical of their children’s academic performance than are American mothers, despite the tendency for their children to show levels of academic achievement superior to those of Americans (Crystal and Stevenson 1991).

2.3 Emotion And Motivation

In regard to emotions, cultural work is providing insight into respects in which affective states, while biologically grounded, are nonetheless constituted, in part, by cultural meanings and practices. For example, somatic experiences that tend to be given a psycho-logical interpretation as emotions by European-Americans are frequently understood and responded to primarily as somatic events within certain Hispanic as well as Asian cultural populations (Shweder et al. 1997). Such effects are closely linked to the tendencies within many Hispanic and Asian cultural communities to interpret social deviance and distress as disorders that originate in problems in interpersonal relation-ships and that require nonpsychological forms of intervention. In another illustration, research reveals that situationally based physiological arousal is not treated as a sufficient condition for experiencing emotions among men from the Minangabau, a matrilineal agrarian cultural group living on the island of Sumatra in western Indonesia (Levenson et al. 1992). Reflecting their culturally based views of self that treat social relations as integrally related to psychological states, Minangkabau men, unlike American men tend not to interpret their physiological arousal in a socially impoverished laboratory situation in emotional terms.

In turn, studies of culture and motivation are highlighting cultural variation in the experience of agency and challenge the widely held assumption that individuals experience most satisfaction when they are acting autonomously. Recent research has shown that, reflecting their culturally based views of self as inherently social, Hindu Indians report comparable satisfaction when acting to meet role-related inter-personal expectations as compared with when acting more spontaneously (Miller and Bersoff 1994). In striking behavioral findings, it has also been demonstrated that, whereas European-American children display highest levels of intrinsic motivation when they have chosen an activity on their own rather than are undertaking one that was chosen for them by their mothers, Asian-American children experience greater satisfaction when their mothers have chosen the activity (Iyengar and Lepper 1999).

3. Implications

3.1 Challenges

In future research, challenges exist in developing approaches to culture that have greater ethnographic validity and that are more dynamic. In this regard, it is important to go beyond dichotomous frameworks for understanding cultural differences, such as the global dimensions of individualism collectivism, interdependent versus independent cultural views of self, or of Eastern versus Western approaches. While powerful in certain respects, these types of frameworks embody stereotypical generalities that fail to capture the complexity of individual cultural systems and that portray cultures in ways that are overly static, uniform, and isolated.

Equally, to fully appreciate the impact of cultural views of the self on psychological processes, greater effort must be made to enhance the cultural informativeness of the constructs brought to bear in psycho-logical inquiry. This involves not merely being concerned with the extent to which methodological approaches are familiar and meaningful for different cultural populations. Rather, it requires as well working to insure the cultural inclusiveness of the theoretical constructs embodied in psychological research. In this regard, it must be recognized that many present psychological methods are informed by the cultural premises of the middle-class European-American populations that to date have been subject to most study by psychologists and remain insufficiently sensitive to the perspectives and concerns of other cultural populations.

Finally, there is a need for future research on culture and the self to become increasingly interdisciplinary, with investigators taking into account the conceptual and methodological insights of psychological, anthropological, and sociolinguistic research traditions and avoiding the present insularity, which results either from ignoring or dismissing work from different disciplinary viewpoints. It must be recognized that ethnographic work and quantitative empirical modes of inquiry are interdependent and need to inform each other.

3.2 Contributions

In conclusion, work on culture and the self is succeeding in contributing not only to an understanding of diversity in psychological functioning but is high-lighting the frequently implicit cultural dependence of many existing psychological constructs and theories. Work in this area is contributing new process explanations to psychological phenomena, through highlighting the dependence of many existing psychological theories on culturally specific views of the self and associated practices. It is also contributing to the broadening of existing psychological constructs and theories through its identification of alternative normative endpoints for human psychological functioning. Rather than leading to an extreme relativism that precludes comparison, work in this area holds the promise of leading to the formulation of models of human development that are increasingly culturally inclusive and theoretically insightful.

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