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

“This suggests, in addition to more complex failure modes, a culturally dictated plasticity may have enabled us to readily adapt to changing circumstances and the vicissitudes of socioecological chance (Heine, 2001; Wallace & Wallace, 1999; Wallace, 2007).”

“…21 (3), 361-370 Relaciones entre cultura y autoconcepto En las últimas décadas un buen número de estudios se han centrado en analizar las relaciones entre cultura y autoconcepto (para revisiones consultar Heine, 2001; Keller, 2006; Markus y Kitayama, 2003; Oyserman y Lee, 2008; Triandis, 2001).”

“Given that East Asians place a greater importance on relationships and roles than abstract internal attributes such as personality traits (Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; however, see Ching et al., 2013), East Asians may be less motivated to form accurate personality impressions.”

“Some researchers have suggested that the internal structure of self-concept for Asian people may be strongly related to their group orientation and social contexts (Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1999; K. Yang, 2004).”

“One possible explanation is that the effect of personality on behaviour—as some theorists have ar‐ gued—is limited in collectivistic cultures, due to individuals’ higher responsibility to social roles and relationships (Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1998; Shweder, 1991; for a discussion, see Church & Katigbak, 2017).”

“Yet cultural psychologists have documented a variety of variations in the way people in different cultures think and relate to one another (e.g., Eastern vs. Western cultures; Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999; Heine, 2001; Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).”

“Additionally, in cross-cultural studies, individual responses from collectivist cultures may be more conservative, further exacerbating measurement bias (Heine, 2001).”

“Cultural variation in standards of self-criticism could have contributed to the observed ethnic differences in health ratings [54, 55].”

“This emphasis on individual effort complements Heine et al.’s (2001) observations that Japanese students were more likely to persevere during challenging tasks compared to American students.”

“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).”

“As a cultural product (Heine 2001) born and brought up in mainland China, I was a real faithful imitator, a silent learner, a model of the official policy of English learning and teaching.”

“Likewise, members of individualist cultures conceptualize the self as being relatively stable and unchanging across situations, whereas collectivist cultures see the individual’s relationships and roles as taking priority over distinctive personal attributes (Heine, 2001).”

“…voluntary frontier settlement, independent self, relational mobility, nepotism INTRODUCTION Cross-cultural research indicates that there are obvious behavioral and cultural differences between North American individuals and Eastern Asian individuals (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Heine, 2001).”

“Cross-cultural studies of self-concept typically contrast allocentric or collectivistic self-conceptions with more individualistic and idiocentric ones (Bond and Cheung, 1983; Heine, 2001; Ma and Schoeneman, 1997).”

“For instance, Heine (2001) and Kanagawa et al. (2001) revealed cultural differences between the United States and East Asian cultures in the ability of the five personality traits to predict individual acts (e.g., joining social clubs or learning to dance) and act composites like being submissive…”

“Cultural psychologists emphasize the deeply intertwined nature of culture and personality (Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).”

“Heine (2001) also argued that the self is a product of culture, and Kitayama et al. (2007) considered the self as a cultural mode of being.”

“We noted further that even within Asian or ‘Confucian-heritage’ cultures in the East, there is considerable variability among the different cultures encompassed by the labels of ‘East Asian’, and even more variability and divergence among individuals living in different localities and communities within these cultures…”

“Nonetheless, this finding is not inconsistent with other cross-cultural research that suggests that those in collectivist cultures take more responsibility for internal causes in general, and are more likely to see internal qualities as ultimately more alterable than do those in individualistic cultures (Markus and Ki…”

“Collectivists continuously attempt to meet the required standards of performance which they have failed to reach, instead of quitting or giving up (Heine, 2001; Heine, Kitayama, Lehman, Takata, et al., 2001; Heine & Raineri, 2009).”

“This perspective, emphasizing independence, is commonly associated with Western culture (Cross et al., 2011; Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).”

“There is vast literature on cultural differences in self-esteem in terms of self-enhancement (e.g., Heine, 2001; Heine & Hamamura, 2007), but this literature does not directly tap into differences on internal and external components of self-esteem.”

“This framework holds that the mind and culture as inseparable and mutually constitutive (Heine, 2001; Zhong & Peng, 2005).”

“interdependent or collectivistic) result in behavioural differences across different cultural contexts (Heine, 2001; Triandis, 1989).”

“The Asian sense of self is described as being ‘‘collectivistic’’ or ‘‘interdependent’’ ( Heine 2001 ).”

“Because social psychological research suggests that self-concept is essentially a social construction [6], one may expect that self-face recognition associated with the positive view of the self is influenced by social and cultural experiences.”

“Selfdetermination and individual rights have greater value in individualistic cultures than they do in collectivistic cultures (Heine, 2001).”

“Cross-cultural psychological studies indicate that East Asians feel more shame, in more contexts, and do so more frequently, than others.”

“Studies on cultural comparisons of self have become more abundant in recent years (e.g., Heine, 2001; Higgins & Bhatt, 2001).”

“Some researchers argue that SE bias is pervasive in individualistic cultures, but not in collectivistic cultures (relativity hypothesis; for example, Heine, 2001), whereas some suggest that it is pan-cultural, although domains and strategies are culture specific (universality hypothesis; for…”

“These values may lead to high desire for and effort toward academic success and to the attribution of academic failures to insufficient effort for Chinese students (Heine, 2001).”

“Accordingly, a person’s self-concept shows “collectivist” or “individualistic” orientations (Heine, 2001).”

“The independent self-view is concerned with expressing individual desires, preferences or abilities, and thus calls for strategies that assert internal attributes of the self, leading to selfenhancing behaviors (e.g., Heine, 2001 ).”

“Furthermore, in East Asian countries there is an emphasis on knowing and acknowledging one’s weaknesses, including a belief that self-criticism plays an important role in optimal learning and development (Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).”

“an individual who has been raised in a highly individualistic society will likely experience selfhood, self-consciousness and cultural awareness in a very different manner than someone who grows up in a more communal or social-oriented environment or culture (Heine, 2001; James & Prilleltensky, 2002).”

“Heine [ 49 ] describes an explicit cultural psychology that views the person as containing a set of biological potentials interacting with particular situational contexts that constrain and afford the expression of various constellations of traits and patterns of behavior.”

“Such examination is badly needed: The cultural psychologist Heine (2001) argues that the extreme nature of American individualism suggests that a psychology based on late twentieth century American research not only stands the risk of developing models that are particular to that culture, but of…”

“In contrast, for people with interdependent self-construals, behaviors are more responsive to social obligations and situational contexts, reducing behavioral consistency and hence crossobserver agreement and self-concept consistency (Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1998).”

“…to people in multiple other sociocultural contexts—are likely to describe themselves with a relatively high proportion of abstract, trait-like terms (Heine, 2001; Rhee, Uleman, Lee, & Roman, 1995; Wang, 2004) and also behave according to their personal preferences (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999; Kim &…”

“…entity that is separate from others, i.e., independent self-construal; on the other hand, the majority of East Asians tend to view the self as a socially embedded entity with strong interconnectedness with others, i.e., interdependent self-construal (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Heine, 2001).”

“Heine (2001) demonstrated significant differences between American and Japanese students in an experimental setting.”

“…& McCrae, 2004; McCrae, 2001; McCrae et al., 2004; McCrae & Costa, 1997; Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, & Benet-Martı́nez, 2007), selfconstrual (Cross, 1995; Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Singelis & Sharkey, 1995), situational experience (Funder, Guillaume, Kumagai, Kawamoto, & Sato, 2012;…”

“Research shows East Asians are more adaptable in adjusting their self-concept to changing circumstances than North Americans (Heine, 2001).”

“Self-esteem, in turn, is associated with well-being (Heine, 2001), meaning that a connection can be drawn from self-serving bias to higher well-being, through self-esteem (Sanjuán & Magallares, 2014).”

“An alternative explanation for the SRE decrease in the 3PP condition may be that compared to the 1PP condition, the task difficulty was increased in the 3PP condition; thus, SRE was only concealed under the difficult task that required additional attention. Several previous studies have found that behavioral performan…”

“This seems unsurprising, given that typical Asian cultural norms of self-criticism should engender hesitancy to deflect attributions away from one’s possible shortcomings (Heine, 2001).”

“Studies show that those who adhere to an individualistic orientation view the world as malleable and believe they are individual agents who can shape their environment according to their desires (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999; Heine, 2001).”

“…lower grades and higher self-concept, may indicate that they develop a self-enhancing orientation by which they tend to select tasks that help to confirm their self-concepts, being more performance oriented (Abu-Hilal et al., 2014; Dweck, 2000; Heine, 2001; Heine & Hamamura, 2007; Minkov, 2008).”

“Past work has evidenced Asian individuals often report higher collectivistic values (Heine, 2001; Kitayama et al., 1997; Wang, 2016), with recent work finding that collectivism is not only about maintaining group harmony but enforcing group norms (Liu et al., 2019).”

“…be presumed that East Asians may be less vulnerable to feeling derailed because they hold a unique lay theory called “dialecticism” (Boucher, 2011; Heine, 2001; Nisbett et al., 2001; Peng & Nisbett, 1999; Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2009, 2010), which stems from Chinese religious, philosophical,…”

“The signi fi cant in fl uences of collectivism on the moral attitudes towards effort re fl ect the intrinsic cultural appreciation for hard work and diligence that is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture (Heine, 2001; Leong et al., 2014).”

“Lastly, the self is shaped by cultural influences (Heine, 2001), and the expression and impact of self-compassion vary across cultures (Arimitsu, 2023; Lou et al., 2022; Montero-Marin et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2021).”

“Thus, when East Asian individuals process visual information of their own faces, they are inclined to link the observed facial features with the broader idea of “face” [16,114].”

“One’s self varies with the culture in which he/she is living (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Heine, 2001).”

“The cultures of East Asia have been described as relatively collectivistic whereas Western cultures have been described as relatively individualistic (Heine, 2001).”