Voluntary settlement and its consequences on predictors of happiness: the influence of initial cultural context

Abstract

Hokkaido—a northern island of Japan that was settled by ethnic Japanese during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century—may remain to be a hybrid of interdependent culture of the mainland Japan and independent culture associated with frontier settlement. We thus anticipated that contemporary Hokkaido residents would exhibit either independent or interdependent psychological profiles depending on the types of behaviors that were required in a given situation. As expected, happiness was associated with positive disengaging emotions (e.g., pride in the self)—an independent profile—in situations that required personal goal pursuit and interpersonal influence; however, happiness was associated with positive engaging emotions (e.g., feelings of closeness)—an interdependent profile—in situations that required interpersonal harmony and adjustment. In contrast, such situational dependency was not observed for either mainland Japanese or Americans. For mainland Japanese happiness was associated with positive engaging emotions whereas for Americans happiness was associated with positive disengaging emotions.

The Culture of Cities: Measuring Perceived Cosmopolitanism

“…By an independent orientation, we mean people’s view of the self as autonomous and bounded as opposed to interconnected with close others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Varnum, Grossmann, Kitayama, & Nisbett, 2010). Research suggests that people with an independent orientation choose to settle in places that symbolize economic opportunities, self-realization, and freedom from social conventions—for example, regions that once constituted a frontier (Ishii, 2014; Ishii, Kitayama, & Uchida, 2014; Kitayama, Conway, Pietromonaco, Park, & Plaut, 2010; Kitayama, Park, Sevincer, Karasawa, & Uskul, 2009; Varnum, 2013; Varnum & Kitayama, 2011). On the basis of these findings, Sevincer et al (2015) suspected that in the modern era, people with a more (vs. less) independent orientation prefer cosmopolitan cities as their residential destinations because, to them, these cities symbolize opportunities for economic success, freedom, open-mindedness, and egalitarianism.…”

Cosmopolitan cities: the frontier in the twenty-first century?

“…This is true for the U.S. as a whole (Kitayama et al, 2009 ) as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Varnum and Kitayama, 2011 ). Finally, the settling of frontiers has been shown to have parallel effects outside of Western cultural contexts; residents of Hokkaido, a northern island of Japan that at the turn of the twentieth century was settled by peasants and farmers from the Japanese mainland, are more independent than mainland Japanese (Kitayama et al, 2006 ; Yamawaki, 2012 ; Ishii, 2014 ; Ishii et al, 2014 ). This body of work supports the idea that independently oriented people feel attracted to lands of opportunity such as frontiers.…”

Ongoing Voluntary Settlement and Independent Agency: Evidence from China

“…For example, researches on mobility have not parsed out the effect of moving from the effect of moving to specific locations (like a frontier city). The concept of relational mobility has come out more recently and thus has not been tested in frontier research ( Kitayama et al, 2006 , 2009 ; Ishii, 2014 ; Ishii et al, 2014 ). One study on the cosmopolitan city hypothesis found that people’s motivation toward independence affected their residential choices—that is, independent people were more likely to move to cosmopolitan cities ( Sevincer et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Furthermore, there is evidence linking voluntary frontier settlement to individualism in interdependent societies. For example, a few studies have examined Hokkaido, a northern island of Japan with a voluntary settlement history during the 19th century, and these areas showed more independent agency measured by cultural tasks such as implicit social orientation, dissonance reduction, and attribution tasks ( Kitayama et al, 2006 ; Ishii, 2014 ; Ishii et al, 2014 ). Researchers have argued that the frontier of the modern world is the cosmopolitan city ( Sevincer et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Due to different cultural backgrounds and history, North Americans and Eastern Asians are different in many aspects such as independent/interdependent agency, relational mobility, interpersonal communication, etc. Many theories and hypotheses have been developed to explain why there are cultural differences in individualism/collectivism or independent/interdependent self-construal ( Kitayama et al, 2006 ; Yuki et al, 2013 ; Ishii, 2014 ; Ishii et al, 2014 ). One of the most famous hypotheses in recent years is the voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis ( Kitayama et al, 2006 , 2014 ).…”