Self and Agency in Context: Ecologies of Abundance and Scarcity

Abstract

This work considers sociocultural foundations of self and agency in material affordances associated with affluence and poverty. We first review work that links independent self-construal and disjoint agency to material abundance. We then report an experiment among students at North American ( n = 52) and West African ( n = 60) universities, in which we manipulated abundance and scarcity concepts and assessed effects on a pronoun-selection measure of self-construal. Participants in the North American setting and abundance condition selected first-person pronouns (particularly, I and me) with greater frequency than did participants in the West African setting and scarcity condition. In contrast to modernity accounts, which propose that individualism promotes prosperity, results are consistent with the alternative account: that abundance can promote independent or disjoint varieties of self and agency. Discussion focuses on the distinction between cultural and structural varieties of sociocultural influence and contributions of international perspectives to psychological science.

Scarcity Polarizes Preferences: The Impact on Choice among Multiple Items in a Product Class

“…These results are consistent with the sociological perspective of "abundance psychology," which suggests that as the means for mass production becomes mastered, people in modern industrialized societies shift from a scarcity mindset and instead take abundance for granted (Adams, Bruckmüller, and Decker 2012;Côté 1993Côté , 1996Riesman 1950).…”

Responses to social exclusion in cultural context: Evidence from farming and herding communities.

“…Rather than emphasizing intemally held variables such as attitudes or values, we focused directly on the everyday realities afforded by sociocultural/economic settings that provide the material basis of psychological outcomes (Markus & Hamedani, 2007). This way, our work provides evidence on the role of extemal practices that remain largely unexamined in conventional psychological theory and research and contributes to previous research in which a cultural-ecological (e.g., Adams et al, 2012;Beny, 1979;Keller, 2011;Whiting & Edwards, 1988) or sociocultural (e.g., Adams, 2005;Plaut, Markus, & Lachman, 2002) approach has been used. In doing so, it helps bridge the psychological with extemal circumstances (Cohen, 2007;Markus & Hamedani, 2007) and allows us to situate the ways in which the characters from our introduction, Mahmut and Kahraman, relate to others within their everyday worlds.…”

Asymmetric Explanations of Group Differences: Experimental Evidence of Foucault’s Disciplinary Power

“…Consequently our experiments on generalization and explanation suggest that psychologists are more likely to consider patterns observed outside the WEIRD world as the phenomena that require explanation in cross‐cultural research (Adams & Salter, 2007). Indeed, the often resulting practice of exporting research and interventions based on WEIRD settings to the rest of the world can be seen as a new form of colonial power that might in subtle ways contribute to global inequalities (Adams, Bruckmüller, & Decker, 2012).…”