Culture and the Self: A New Global Perspective

How we see ourselves shapes our lives, and is shaped by our cultural context. Self-perceptions influence, among other things, how we think about the world, our social relationships, health and lifestyle choices, community engagement, political actions, and ultimately our own and other people's well-being.

Social scientists have long understood that people in different parts of the world see themselves in different ways, but research has often been driven by a rather black-and-white — and some would say stereotypical — view of what the differences are.

In an article just published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vignoles and colleagues (2016) (PDF, 209KB) introduce a new perspective on cultural differences in self-construal. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and conducted by members of the Culture and Identity Research Network among more than 10,000 members of diverse cultural groups spanning all inhabited continents, their research explodes the common myth of a "West-versus-the-Rest" divide in self-perceptions.

For several decades, psychological scientists have commonly assumed that Western cultures foster seeing oneself as independent from others, whereas the rest of the world's cultures foster seeing oneself as interdependent with others. Critics have argued that this view of cultural diversity is too simplistic, but it has remained a dominant assumption in the field — and researchers often explain unsupportive findings away as methodological failures rather than question it.

The new research paints a much richer picture of diversity in cultural models of selfhood. It shows that Western cultures tend to emphasize certain ways of being independent (e.g., being different from others, self-directed, and self-expressive), but not others (e.g., being self-interested, self-reliant, and consistent across contexts).

Viewed in global context, Western cultures are not "exceptional" but they form part of the broad kaleidoscope of global variation. Nor is cultural individualism linked straightforwardly to independent self-perceptions, as has been commonly presumed.  Different ways of seeing oneself as both independent and interdependent were emphasized in different parts of the world, and this was partly explained by socioeconomic development and religious heritage of the cultural groups studied.

The findings will be important to practitioners and researchers interested in cultural diversity. They open up new research possibilities that will help researchers better understand how psychological processes vary across the world.

A richer understanding of cultural variation, based firmly on empirical research rather than stereotypes, could help practitioners intervene more effectively with members of diverse cultural communities.

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Note: This article is in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area.