Self as Cultural Product: An Examination of East Asian and North American Selves

Abstract

In the past decade a wealth of research has been conducted on the cultural foundation of the self-concept, particularly with respect to East Asian and North American selves. The present paper discusses how the self differs across these two cultural contexts, particularly with respect to an emphasis on consistency versus flexibility, an intraindividual versus an extraindividual focus, the malleability of the self versus world, the relation of self to others, and self-enhancing versus self-critical motivations. These differences reveal the manifold ways that culture shapes the self.

An Exploratory Qualitative Exploration of the Personal Values Underpinning Taiwanese and Malaysians’ Wine Consumption Behaviors

“…This finding supports Heine [38], who found that East Asians were more likely to find themselves fulfilling different societal obligations on different occasions (such as when interacting with people with different statuses). Hence, in a host-client situation, East Asian hosts are more likely to purchase more expensive wines to treat someone with a higher social status.…”

Psychological Universals: What Are They and How Can We Know?

“…As noted, the pronounced lack of evidence for self-enhancing motivations among East Asians suggests that such evolutionary accounts are problematic. If self-enhancement serves the function of maintaining status, belongingness, or quelling existential fears, then why in cultures such as East Asia, in which concerns with status and belongingness are arguably stronger than they are in the West (e.g., Heine, 2001) and existential fears seem to be at least as strong (Heine, Harihara, & Niiya, 2002), do we see much less evidence of selfenhancement? An evolutionary account of the origins of the selfenhancement motivation needs to be able to address why the motivation appears so much stronger in Western cultures than in East Asia.…”

Foundations of computational psychiatry: a mathematical treatment of embodied cognition and its disorders

“…They state that Individuals with OCD, or with a high risk of developing OCD, suffer from recurrent, unwanted, and intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and engage in repititive ritualistic behaviors (compulsions), usually aimed to prevent, reduce, or eliminate distress or feared consequences of the obsessions. Relief by rituals is generally temporary and contributes to future ritual engagement... [U]ntreated sysmptoms often persist or increase over time, causing significant impairment in social, professional, academic, and/or family functioning... OCD and its subclinical manifestations thus appear widespread in studied culturally Western populations, indeed, perhaps a canonical failure mode (but see Heine, 2001 for another possible interpretation).…”

“…Thus analogous disorders might arise from similar 'topological failures' affecting the real-time recruitment of brain, body, culture, regulatory, and environmental information sources. The central role of culture in human biology means, of course, that, for humans, all such disorders are inherently 'culture bound syndromes', much in the spirit of Kleinman and Cohen (1997) and Heine (2001).…”

“…Atmanspacher (2006), for example, argues that formal theory of high-level cognition is itself at a point like that of physics 400 years ago, with the basic entities and the relations between them yet to be determined. Further complications arise via the overwhelming influence of culture on both mental process and its dysfunction (e.g., Heine, 2001;Kleinman and Cohen 1997), something to which we will return. Chapter 5 of Wallace and Wallace (2013) provides a more detailed exploration.…”