Introduction to Cultural Psychology Lecture 4: Self &
Motivation
Caveat 1: Multicultural minds
It is not only national differences, we all have multicultural identities and we participate in
multicultural contexts of which religion, social class, language, gender, sexuality, nationality,
ethnicity are separate aspects and salient identities to people. Cultural Psychology has done a
lot of research on these aspects and not so much on others. However, there is some research
on social class, there is some on gender but not that much. And then on the intersectionality of
differences there is very little empirical research.
Caveat 2: Cultures are not monolithic
Cultures are not monolithic. Differences in group averages do not
explain individual experience. You have to keep in mind, when talking
about group differences, a lot of the findings will show that the mean on
one scale was this in that culture and the mean was this on a scale in
another culture. During the lecture the picture on the right is shown,
which displays two normal distributions and If you would look at what
the mean is, then you look at two highest points (the tops). But there is
also a part that overlaps (see the other picture on the right), in which
there is a part of the people that are from a culture where expressing
anger is fine, but find themselves lower in the distribution than the mean
from the other culture where expressing anger is not usual. Means cannot
be applied to everyone in the population. There will be people from one
culture who are actually above the mean of the other culture.
Caveat 3: Language matters
Statements such as: “As collectivists, Asians mainly hang out with
people they know”, “Westerners have really high self-esteem” are problematic because they
are categorizing, generalizing and reducing in their use of words and meaning. For instance, it
implies that Asians are collectivists and nothing else. So, the way you phrase things and the
words that you use to express yourself and your opinion are important, crucial even.
I you have to describe yourself in terms of personality traits, then you can do this in several
ways, namely you can use abstract traits, which are stable characteristics and that can exist by
themselves. Furthermore, you can use descriptions that highlight more the relationships and
roles and more context-dependent behavior.
Who am I?
Research that is done by Heine (2015), has asked
people from different cultures to describe
themselves using traits. They asked American
Undergrad student, Nairobian Undergrad students,
Workers in Nairobi, Masai’s and Samburu’s.
What can be seen in the graph (that you can see in
the picture on the right), is that you can see that
the left sight is opposite to the right. The workers
in Nairobi, the Masai’s and the Samburu’s
,describe themselves more in terms of roles and memberships. This in comparison to
American Undergrads and Nairobian Undergrads who describe themselves more in terms of
personal characteristics. There are multiple explanations for this, it could be for instance that
being a student places an emphasis on performance and individuality. The research done by
Markus & Kitayama (1991) found that the way that people think about themselves that people
not only think about themselves explicitly but they also have implicit concepts about
themselves that really differ across cultures. The difference that they propose is the one
between a more independent self and a more interdependent self. They do align, to some
extent, with individualism and collectivism. But the difference is really that individualism and
collectivism was conceptualized as a cultural level variable, something that described values
that are shared within a cultural context. While this, the content of self as proposed by Markus
& Kitayama (1991), is something that describes the experience at the level of the individual
so they can align but they do not have to.
Independent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991)
What this figure tries to highlight is that these large X’s, which
would be considered the central attributes of the self and these are all
situated within the individual distinct from others. So, the self is
experienced as distinct from others and self-defining aspects are within
the individual. The other thing that you can see is that the line around
the individual is a solid line and the lines of the surrounding circles,
such as friend and mother, are also solid and there is not a lot of
overlap. People are close and relevant and important; the independent
self has meaningful relationships of course. But meaningful
relationships are less central to the self than the self-defining
characteristics. You can see that there are x’s in the other circles, such
as ‘friend’ and ‘mother’, but they are less relevant. The other thing that
you can see to some extent, is that the self is bounded and stable. The other thing that is
important about the graph, is this line around the in-group, that is dashed, which means that it
is relatively more permeable. Strangers can more easily become friends and friends can also
leave the in-group, if for some reason the friendship does not work anymore.
In the second picture, you can see the graph that Markus and
Kitayama proposed for the interdependent self. This has influenced a lot
of the thinking in Psychology and the independent self was, without
being questioned, assumed to be the standard mode. They argued that
this is a way of functioning that in fact only applies to a small part of the
world’s population. A large part of the population operates with the
interdependent self. And again, this is not something that is
deterministic, it is not the case that you are only independent and never
interdependent. It is about relative importance, what people chronically
tend to do. What you see in this picture and is different from the
previous graph is, that the in-group out-group boundary is solid so it is
harder to move into that big circle. Also people do things that make sure
that people don’t leave the in-group that easily. The line around the
individual is dashed, the idea being that the boundary between self and other is less strict but
more permeable. You also see that some of the core attributes, the features of the self that
people consider to be very important are in this intersection. If you think of the self as
something that is less bounded and is more permeable and has a lot of the important attributes
in the intersection with others. As you move from context to context, from being with a friend
to being with your mother or your brother, the way that your self is in that moment may be
, different. So the self is seen as being more fluid and more situation or context dependent.
Finally, the ingroup-outgroup distinction is solid.
*Question posed during the lecture: For which self would it be easier to adapt to a new
environment/culture? *
Michael Boiger answered the following: I would guess this to be the interdependent
self, because in this kind of self, the self is fluid and situation-dependent which would make it
easier to adapt to new situations and environments.
Self-concept in the brain?
A picture is shown about a study that looked at the extent to which we can see cultural
variation in the self-concept in the brain. What you see here are scans of the prefrontal medial
cortex and the nucleus acumens in Chinese and Western individuals. It was a study from
China, so these were Western people who were living in China. In that study, the participants
were asked to write judgments about themselves and their mothers. The scans that you see in
the picture, is that they took the data from the ratings on the self and the data from the ratings
on their mothers and subtracted them from each other. What you see here in this picture is the
difference between the two. There is a difference in the areas that become activated when
doing the tests, which show that there is no difference for the Chinese participants whereas
there is a difference for the Western participants. So you see the same pattern of brain
activation for the Chinese participants and more activation in the medio prefrontal cortex for
the Western participants. This is to show you, that some of these ideas have real consequences
for how the mind is organized within the brain.
Self-concept &IndCol
Going to the other side of the extreme, so from the brain to the context. There is of course a
connection between the self-concept and the cultural values of individualism and collectivism.
How does the one influence the other? Why would people in more individualistic cultural
context be more likely to have independent selves? The cultural practices within
individualistic cultures stress self-sufficiency, these could be simple things such as co-
sleeping arrangements, learning this as a child at a very young age. There is huge variation
across cultures whether parents think babies should be in their own room. With Western
cultures there’s also variation regarding this subject, Dutch people think babies should sleep
in their own room around 6 months while Germans think this should be around 1-2 years old.
All these different practices would lead to a more independent view on the self(-concept).
This can be seen as a continuous cycle, because if you have a lot of people with independent
self-concepts than you will also find that the values within a cultural context tend to be more
individualistic. The same would be true for collectivism, because if the cultural practices
within a culture stress connectedness this in turn would lead to a more interdependent self-
concept. Furthermore, there are proximal and distal causes on the prevalence of different
self-concepts. A distal cause would be agriculture. There are also more proximal causes,
such as education and the different educational practices or the different extent to which
people have a university or college education or any kind of formalized education in general.
This is not only something that happens between different parts of the world, but it also
happens within the same cultural context. In the paper of this week it is discussed how does
the environment in Boston and San Francisco, the different values in these two places, how do
they lead to different cultural practices and how do these practices in turn shape different
psychological tendencies within the United States. The very distinct city cultures between the
East Coast and the West Coast.
Self-concept & implicit self-theories
