Cultures and Selves

Summary & key facts

This article reviews theory and research on how people and cultures shape each other. It defines the self as the “me” at the center of experience — a developing sense of awareness and agency that forms as a person (both brain and body) becomes tuned to different environments. The authors say selves give culture-specific shape to mental processes like attention, perception, thinking, emotion, motivation, and relationships, and that selves also reinforce or sometimes change the social ideas and practices around them. The paper highlights independence and interdependence as key ways selves differ across cultures and notes ongoing challenges and debates in the field.

Key facts:

• The paper is a selective review of theoretical and empirical work on culture and the self, not a report of new experiments.
• The authors define the self as the “me” at the center of experience — a developing awareness and sense of agency tied to both brain and body.
• Selves form as people become attuned to their environments and incorporate patterns from those environments into how they think and act.
• Selves give culture-specific form and function to psychological processes such as attention, perception, cognition (thinking), emotion, motivation, and interpersonal relationships.
• Selves and cultures stand in an ongoing cycle of mutual constitution: cultures shape selves, and selves reinforce or sometimes change cultures.
• The paper discusses independence and interdependence as ways that selves can differ across cultural contexts and notes continuing challenges and controversies in studying these topics.

Abstract

The study of culture and self casts psychology's understanding of the self, identity, or agency as central to the analysis and interpretation of behavior and demonstrates that cultures and selves define and build upon each other in an ongoing cycle of mutual constitution. In a selective review of theoretical and empirical work, we define self and what the self does, define culture and how it constitutes the self (and vice versa), define independence and interdependence and determine how they shape psychological functioning, and examine the continuing challenges and controversies in the study of culture and self. We propose that a self is the "me" at the center of experience-a continually developing sense of awareness and agency that guides actions and takes shape as the individual, both brain and body, becomes attuned to various environments. Selves incorporate the patterning of their various environments and thus confer particular and culture-specific form and function to the psychological processes they organize (e.g., attention, perception, cognition, emotion, motivation, interpersonal relationship, group). In turn, as selves engage with their sociocultural contexts, they reinforce and sometimes change the ideas, practices, and institutions of these environments.

Topics

Cultural Differences and Values Social and Intergroup Psychology Social Representations and Identity

Categories

Psychology Social Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Acoustics Agency (philosophy) Anthropology Biology Cognition Cognitive psychology Computer science Epistemology Evolutionary biology Function (biology) Identity (music) Interpersonal communication Interpretation (philosophy) Neuroscience Perception Philosophy Physics Programming language Psychology Self Sense of agency Social psychology Sociocultural evolution Sociology