In this interesting Perspectives paper from the open access Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the authors analyzed current poster abstracts from the 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) in Beijing and scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals that addressed the neural foundations of culturally-shaped ways of defining or understanding the self. Their framework consisted of four biases - essentialism, binarity, Eurocentrism, and postcolonial and Orientalist views of the Self.

Both at the level of hypotheses generation and at the level of data interpretation, all research is influenced by specific socio-political and historical contexts. In this respect we argue that all quoted CN studies referring to the self are rooted in a specific context which defines the relevant research questions and topics and the way of interpretation. This context is traversed by social circumstances, political interests, and imbalances of power (Martínez Mateo et al., 2012).

Seems that social constructionist models are also gaining ground in the realm of brain mapping, brain imaging, and cognitive neuroscience more widely.


Full Citation: 

Martínez Mateo M, Cabanis M, Stenmanns J and Krach S. (2013). Essentializing the binary self: individualism and collectivism in cultural neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; 7:289. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00289

Essentializing the binary self: individualism and collectivism in cultural neuroscience

M. Martínez Mateo, M. Cabanis, J. Stenmanns, and S. Krach

Within the emerging field of cultural neuroscience (CN) one branch of research focuses on the neural underpinnings of “individualistic/Western” vs. “collectivistic/Eastern” self-views. These studies uncritically adopt essentialist assumptions from classic cross-cultural research, mainly following the tradition of Markus and Kitayama (1991), into the domain of functional neuroimaging. In this perspective article we analyze recent publications and conference proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (2012) and problematize the essentialist and simplistic understanding of “culture” in these studies. Further, we argue against the binary structure of the drawn “cultural” comparisons and their underlying Eurocentrism. Finally we scrutinize whether valuations within the constructed binarities bear the risk of constructing and reproducing a postcolonial, orientalist argumentation pattern.

Introduction

At the 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping which was held in Beijing (June 10–14, 2012) the official program was amended by the philosophical supplement “Entering the Mind's I: Some reflections on the Chinese notion of self.” The supplement begins by explaining that the “concept of the individual as outlined by Western philosophy finds its most successful and most immediate conceptual and visual transposition in the work The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo [da Vinci].” The authors of this supplement pursue by stating that “No iconographic representation could be more antithetical to the concept of an individual characterized by the entirety of Chinese philosophy and culture (…)” (Lietti, 2012). 

During the conference various other contributions, symposia [e.g., “Imaging the sociocultural human brain” by Gao (2012)], i-poster presentations, or posters addressed “culturally” tuned ways of understanding the self. In these presentations the neural basis of “individualistic/Western” and “collectivistic/Eastern” “cultures” and their way of treating the self were discussed in comparison based on new insights from functional neuroimaging. 

But what does it mean to presume a “culturally” imprinted self? And what are the implications of considering two seemingly complementary groups with putatively opposed world- and self-views? The classic review of “cross-cultural” research by Markus and Kitayama (1991) represents the primary inspiration for actual neuroimaging work on “East/West” comparisons. We argue that, by doing so, assumptions implied in classic cross-cultural research are adopted to the functional neuroimaging community without being scrutinized. “Psychological” findings about “cultural differences” are thereby translated onto a “biological” level treating “culture” as a characteristic which can be read out from the body. By means of neuroimaging technology the simplifications of “culture” inherent to many cross-cultural psychological studies receive additional support as cultural differences can now be fostered by biological “evidence.” 

Here we elaborate why such neuroscientific findings bear the risk of constructing and reproducing essentialist (1), binarized (2), and Eurocentric (3) ways of thinking and acting which follow a postcolonial and orientalist tradition (4). These four dimensions build the frame for the current analysis. They all refer to specific traditions of critique which originate from philosophy and social science and which will be introduced in more detail in the respective sections of this manuscript. 

The endeavor to studying “cultural” phenomena by using functional MRI started only in the last decade (Chiao, 2009; Han and Northoff, 2009;Vogeley and Roepstorff, 2009; Kitayama and Park, 2010; Losin et al., 2010; Bao and Pöppel, 2012; Han et al., 2013; Rule et al., 2013). Since the year 2000 the number of publications in the cultural neurosciences (CN) has increased tremendously. Although particular concepts of “culture” are implied, these are only rarely explicitly addressed (Martínez Mateo et al., 2012, 2013). Within the field of CN, however, a particular branch has focused on “culturally” tuned ways of understanding the self [see Martínez Mateo et al. (2012) for a review on different branches in CN]. For the purpose of the present article we searched (i) peer-reviewed English language manuscripts of original functional MRI studies indexed in large databases (e.g., Google Scholar; PubMed) and (ii) abstracts published in the this year's Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) abstract book [pdf] which addressed the neural correlates of the self or self-concepts such as individualism and collectivism in a “cultural” context using cerebral blood flow imaging techniques such as fMRI or fNIRS. Overall, 10 manuscripts and 10 conference abstracts fulfilled these criteria and thus, formed the data pool for the present analysis. 

From these publications we extracted the aforementioned four fundamental dimensions which we problematize by briefly discussing their immanent assumptions, their implications and consequences.

Read the whole article.

David Brooks on President Obama's Inaugural Speech

If you have not yet read or seen the President Obama's 2013 Inaugural Speech from Monday, you can watch it below or read it here.


There has been a lot said about this speech, much of which demonstrates that President Obama's desire to create more unity, a "We, the People" foundation for his second term, is not likely to get very far - liberals mostly applaud the speech and conservatives largely reject it.

However, one of the best commentaries came this morning from the New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks. As his interests have shifted more and more toward social sciences (he reads a LOT in the realms of psychology, neuroscience, and social psychology), his columns have become thoughtful and nuanced (with some notable exceptions), and this one exemplifies that tendency in him.

The Collective Turn

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 21, 2013

The best Inaugural Addresses make an argument for something. President Obama’s second one, which surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century, makes an argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism.

His critics have sometimes accused him of being an outsider, but Obama wove his vision from deep strands in the nation’s past. He told an American story that began with the Declaration and then touched upon the railroad legislation, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the highway legislation, the Great Society, Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall.

Turning to the present, Obama argued that America has to change its approach if it wants to continue its progress. Modern problems like globalization, technological change, widening inequality and wage stagnation compel us to take new collective measures if we’re to pursue the old goals of equality and opportunity.

Obama wasn’t explicit about why we have failed to meet these challenges. But his critique was implicit. There has been too much “me” — too much individualism and narcissism, too much retreating into the private sphere. There hasn’t been enough “us,” not enough communal action for the common good.

The president then described some of the places where collective action is necessary: to address global warming, to fortify the middle class, to defend Medicare and Social Security, to guarantee equal pay for women and equal rights for gays and lesbians.

During his first term, Obama was inhibited by his desire to be postpartisan, by the need to not offend the Republicans with whom he was negotiating. Now he is liberated. Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display. He argued for it in a way that was unapologetic. Those who agree, those who disagree and those of us who partly agree now have to raise our game. We have to engage his core narrative and his core arguments for a collective turn.

I am not a liberal like Obama, so I was struck by what he left out in his tour through American history. I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, but I’d also mention Wall Street, State Street, Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. I’d emphasize that America has prospered because we have a decentralizing genius.

When Europeans nationalized their religions, we decentralized and produced a great flowering of entrepreneurial denominations. When Europe organized state universities, our diverse communities organized private universities. When Europeans invested in national welfare states, American localities invested in human capital.

America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen by those at the national headquarters. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders who could never have attracted the attention of a president or some public-private investment commission.

I would have been more respectful of this decentralizing genius than Obama was, more nervous about dismissing it for the sake of collective action, more concerned that centralization will lead to stultification, as it has in every other historic instance.

I also think Obama misunderstands this moment. The Progressive Era, New Deal and Great Society laws were enacted when America was still a young and growing nation. They were enacted in a nation that was vibrant, raw, underinstitutionalized and needed taming.

We are no longer that nation. We are now a mature nation with an aging population. Far from being underinstitutionalized, we are bogged down with a bloated political system, a tangled tax code, a byzantine legal code and a crushing debt.

The task of reinvigorating a mature nation is fundamentally different than the task of civilizing a young and boisterous one. It does require some collective action: investing in human capital. But, in other areas, it also involves stripping away — streamlining the special interest sinecures that have built up over the years and liberating private daring.

Reinvigorating a mature nation means using government to give people the tools to compete, but then opening up a wide field so they do so raucously and creatively. It means spending more here but deregulating more there. It means facing the fact that we do have to choose between the current benefits to seniors and investments in our future, and that to pretend we don’t face that choice, as Obama did, is effectively to sacrifice the future to the past.

Obama made his case beautifully. He came across as a prudent, nonpopulist progressive. But I’m not sure he rescrambled the debate. We still have one party that talks the language of government and one that talks the language of the market. We have no party that is comfortable with civil society, no party that understands the ways government and the market can both crush and nurture community, no party with new ideas about how these things might blend together.

But at least the debate is started. Maybe that new wind will come.

Michel Bauwens - The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective

I think I have seen this article before, a long while back, but it's good to see it posted at Reality Sandwich where it will get some wider exposure. Bauwens is advocating a communal or relational spirituality, which seems like a logical extension on the P2P philosophy, which includes "distributed networks" as a foundational idea.

I am in total agreement with a more relational view of spiritual evolution, contra the highly individualistic focus of the mainstream integral crowd. Clearly, both paths are useful and necessary, but integral has focused nearly all of their marketing on the individual path.

The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective

Michel Bauwens

 

Spiritual expression, and the religious organizational formats in which context it will take place, is always embedded in a social structure. For example, we could say that the tribal forms of religion, such as animism and shamanism, do not have elaborate hierarchical structures as they arose in societal structures that had fairly egalitarian kinship based relations. But the great organized religions, which arose in hierarchically-based societies, have intricate hierarchical structures, monological conceptions of truth, and expectations of obedience from its members. The Protestant Reformation and its offshoots took on the many democratic aspects which corresponded to the rise of a new urban class under merchant and industrial capitalism, and the many offshoots of the new age movements have clearly adopted contemporary capitalist practices of paid workshops, trainings, etc ... (i.e. taking the form of spiritual experience as a consumable commodity).

In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.

To organize our thoughts, we will use a triarchical division of organizational forms, and a quaternary structure of human relations. Human organizational formats can be laid out as network structures, outlining the relationships between the members of a community. A common network format is the hierarchical one, where relations and actions are initiated from the center. It is graphically represented by a star form, but also often represented as a pyramidal structure. A second very common network format is the decentralized network, where agents actions and relations are constrained by prior hubs. In decentralized networks power has devolved to different groups or entities, which have to find a balance together, and agents generally belong to the different decentralized groups, which represent their interests in some way. Finally, we have distributed networks, which are graphically represented by the same hub and spoke graphic, but contain a crucial differentiating characteristic. In distributed networks, though there are indeed hubs, i.e. nodes with a higher density of connections, these hubs remain voluntary. Think of the difference between taking a plane that is going to go to the destination via a hub airport, and you have no choice but stay in the place, whose flight path has been decided by someone else, and the much greater freedom that you have in a car, where you can still pass through that big city hub if you want, and many people do, but you can also go around it, the choice is yours.

Our first contention is that distributed networks are becoming a dominant format of human technological and organizational frameworks. Think about the internet and the web as point to point or end to end networks. Think about the emerging micro media practices such as wiki's and blogging, which allow many human agents to express themselves by bypassing former decentralized mass media. Think of the team-based organized project groups increasingly being used in the worksphere. In a distributed network, the peers are free to connect and to act, and the organizational characteristics are emerging from the choices of the individuals. The second framework we are using is the quaternary relational typology proposed by the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, who describes this extensively in his landmark treatise, the "Structures of Social Life."

According to Fiske, there are four main ways that humans can relate to each other, and this typology is valid across different cultures and epochs, as an underlying grammar. Cultures and civilizations will choose different combinations, but one format may be dominant.

Equality matching is the logic of the gift economy, which was the dominant format of the tribal era. According to this logic, the one that gives obtains prestige, and the one that receives feels an obligation to return the favour, in one way or another, so that the equality of the relationship could be maintained. Tribal cultures have elaborate ritualized and festive mechanisms, organized around the notion of reciprocity and symmetry, to allow this process to happen. The second relational logic is Authority Ranking, and corresponds to the just as important human need to compare. This ranking may be the result of birth, of force or coercion, of nomination by a prior hierarchy, of credentials, even of merit. Authority Ranking is the main logic of the imperial and tributary hierarchies (such as the feudal system) which dominated human society before the advent of capitalism and parliamentary democracy. The strong protects and provides for the safety of the weak, who in exchange, pay a tribute. These societies were moved by the concept of a life debt, from the human to the divine order sustaining it, and from the mass of the living to the representatives of that divine order, who required tribute in order to extinguish that debt. The organizing principle is one of centrality (represented by kingship) and redistribution of the resources by a hierarchy. The third format is Market Pricing, based on the neutral exchange of comparable values. This is the logic of the capitalist market system, and the impersonal relations on which its economic system is based.

Finally, there is the logic of Communal Shareholding, which is based on generalized or non-reciprocal exchange. In this form of human relations, members collectively and voluntarily contribute to a common resource, in exchange for the free usage of that resource. Examples are the medieval agricultural commons, the mutualities of the labour movement, and the theoretical notion of communism used by Marx (but of course not the hierarchical Authority Ranking practice of regimes abusively using this nomenclature). There is of course a relationship between the organizational triarchy and the quaternary relational grammar. The tribal era was based on small kinship based distributed networks, which had little relationship to each other; the imperial and feudal regimes use the hierarchical formats, and capitalist societies used mostly decentralized political structures (the balance of power of democratic governance) and competition between firms. In contrast, the current social structures are increasingly moving towards manyfold affinity based distributed networks, interconnected on a global scale. 

Read the whole article.

Dave Pollard - Collective Mindfulness Practices

 
This is an interesting post from Dave Pollard at How to Save the World (his blog is under the Creative Commons License: some rights reserved). However, I think he is missing a huge piece of the puzzle as to why the effects of violence, addiction, and abuse are so much more visible now - namely, that we are moving into more of a post-modern cultural perspective that honors feelings and experience, whereas many our parents were born into a world that was still largely devoted to rules and roles, which are defined by religion or some other "higher" power.

That is no longer true. Large parts of our society now honor feelings even more than rational thought - with sometimes disastrous results. But it has created an atmosphere where it is not only okay to seek treatment for these childhood traumas, it's actually encouraged, and it's also encouraged to talk about them in public, in magazine interviews, in books/memoirs, and in movies and television.

As far as I can see, this is mostly a good thing.

Later in the article, however, when he talks about collective mindfulness practices, I think he's on to something. Here are some of the practices he has come up with through discussions with Michael and other friends:

1. Ask open, interesting questions, and enable the group to explore them without expecting to find answers.
2. Bohm/Bohmian Dialogue:
   • “Bohm dialogue is a way of being together in a group. Twenty to forty participants sit in a circle, for a few hours during regular meetings, or for a few days in a workshop environment. This is done with no predefined purpose, no agenda, other than that of inquiring into the movement of thought, and exploring the process of ‘thinking together’ collectively. This activity can allow group participants to examine their preconceptions and prejudices, as well as to explore the more general movement of thought.” (Thanks to Seb Paquet for this link)
   • Participants of such Dialogues (the etymological meaning of the word is ‘speaking among’ and the ‘dia-’ means ‘across or among’ not ‘two’ as many think) are urged (a) to suspend judgements and expectations, (b) not to make any group decisions during or at the conclusion of the dialogue (the process is emergent), (c) to practice total honesty, openness and transparency, and (d) to build on rather than challenging or contradicting what has been said before.
   • Rather than being action-oriented (although some users of the approach have coopted it for making decisions and agreeing upon actions), this approach seems to be all about increasing understanding of who we (collectively) are, and appreciation of how our thoughts align and differ, our worldviews and belief systems overlap and diverge, how our minds work, imagine and create, and how we “change” our minds.
3. Karl Weick’s Simplicity Beyond Complexity Sense-making approach:
   • Encourage unstructured conversations to enable shared meaning and understanding to emerge.
   • Enable people to move beyond fixed self-identities, to learn about themselves and see themselves differently and more empowered, more flexible.
   • Appreciate that we often act even before we “make up our minds” and then rationalize what we did, and facilitate a deep understanding of what actually underlies our actions and decisions.
   • Encourage suspension of decisions and avoidance of confirmation bias (hearing what we want to hear and disregarding what doesn’t fit with our worldviews and beliefs).
   • Help people understand that complex processes are dynamic and ongoing and that rigorous analysis, forecasts, predictions, causal certainty, defined goals, ends and mandates are inherently simplistic and unrealistic ways to deal with them.
   • Dig deeper beyond what seems to make ‘perfect’ sense, with the knowledge that the truth is always more profound and complex than we can every fully understand.
   • Iterate and try lots of “safe-fail” explorations and experiments to avoid being locked in to one way of thinking or one course of action.
4. Make music, art, theatre, quilts, or barns together, improvisationally and cohesively.
5. Nature walks, watching the sunrise/sunset/storm/stars, and similar unstructured shared observation and exploration experiences. By this I mean peaceful, silent, reflective activities, not White Mile character-building or cult indoctrination activities. I also don’t mean watching movies or theatre together — such activities, like reading (even while in each other’s arms), take our attention away from the others we attend with, instead of engaging us together as part of a larger whole.
6. Playing together, either collaboratively or, if not, then without intense competition or keeping score. Role-playing games, cooperative board games, ultimate frisbee — it doesn’t really matter what you play.
7. Eating together, without outside distractions.

Be sure to read the whole article - these suggestions make only minimal sense out of context.

Collective Mindfulness Practices

Dave Pollard - Feb. 16, 2012

 

The other day I had lunch with Michael Nenonen, a Vancouver social worker and freelance journalist (and a new friend). Michael has written a lot about the malaise of our modern culture and the damage it has done to us individually and collectively. One of the things we discussed was why, when there is plenty of evidence that physical and psychological abuse (in families, in the workplace, and in institutions) was at least as common in previous generations of our modern industrial civilization as it is today, the evidence of the trauma that abuse causes seems so much more visible today. Were previous generations just more stoic than ours in accepting this? Were they somehow more resilient, less affected by it than we are?

Michael’s view is that, in the first place, the damage done in previous generations was just as great — the extent of alcoholism, incarceration of the “mentally ill”, and the consequent abuse these previous generations have in turn inflicted on ours, all attest to that. The fact that it’s more visible today, he thinks, is due to the evolution of our society in recent generations from a “producer” society to a “consumer” society. My parents’ generation was expected to work hard and produce, and were assessed by their peers (and probably self-assessed as well) by how successful and effective they were at producing. There was considerably less tolerance for or consideration of behaviours of conspicuous consumption, or in fact any “weak”, unproductive, unexemplary or disobedient behaviour. One was expected to behave oneself, and, when one felt bad, buck it up, for the good of all.

By contrast, we are now judged largely by what we consume, and it is relatively unimportant how we came by the means to consume it (hard work, theft or inheritance). As a result, a much broader range of visible behaviour is tolerated, and responsibility for what we do and how we act has been substantially left to our discretion (or lack thereof). The “insane asylums” and hospitals for the poor have mostly been emptied and closed, their previous residents for the most part thrown into the streets. From schools to workplaces to religious observances, our culture has been socially deregulated, and the result is that our personal and collective trauma is on display, untreated (for better or worse), unconcealed and made our own personal responsibility. It is even, when sufficiently entertaining, celebrated, in an endless orgy of schadenfreude on Reality TV.

We are left to heal ourselves, and our homes and communities have now become the prisons and hospitals in which we seek to do it. Mental illness has become a huge and profitable industry for Big Pharma to exploit; giant pill-pushing corporations now relentlessly press us to “ask your doctor if X is right for you” (and challenge him or her if the answer is “no”).

Read more.

Michael Greenberg - Four Weeks on Wall Street

This is an interesting take on the Occupy Wall Street movement from the New York Review of Books.

The events on Wall Street are being live-streamed on Global Revolution, see below.

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Here is the beginning of the article from NYR:

Four Weeks on Wall Street

Michael Greenberg

Henny Ray Abrams/AP Photo

Clergymen carrying a "False Idol" to the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park, New York City

Entering Zuccotti Park on October 4, a Tuesday, I felt as if I had walked into an impromptu forum. The park itself, which was renovated in 2006, is rather festive with its locust trees, its areas of planted mums, and, near the southeast corner, an anodyne red sculpture by Mark di Suvero entitled “Joie de Vivre” that rises seventy feet into the air. The Occupy Wall Street encampment was surprisingly well organized, with a “People’s Library” with plastic bins containing the kind of books you would find in a middle-class beach house. There was a phone-charging station, a medical area, a kitchen, and, along the southern wall of the park, a sleeping zone clumped with blankets, sleeping bags, rain tarps, and various personal belongings. A group of young men swept up refuse and put it in garbage bags.

Spontaneous debates broke out among the constantly forming and dissolving clusters of people—about home schooling, vegetarianism, racial profiling on the part of taxi drivers who are racially profiled themselves. Microphones and cameras were thrust forward without warning, belonging to members of the press or demonstrators, one couldn’t always tell. As often as not they came from a core group of protesters who were live-streaming the activities in the park on Global Revolution. Their command post (though they would strongly reject the phrase) comprised the inviolable hub of the encampment: the computer equipment was guarded unthreateningly by the people’s security force who stood ready to form a protective phalanx around the area should trouble arise.

The mood was expectant, spirits generally high, though not without a dampening note of ambivalence. Several of New York’s most important unions—including that of health care workers, teachers, transit workers, and communications workers—had organized a march to Foley Square for the following day in support of the protesters. The significance of these endorsements was enormous, conferring on the movement an instant legitimacy that many of its most seasoned members had not expected and some had not wanted at all. Several protesters anxiously told me of their determination “to keep the process pure” in the face of the new outside pressures. “Horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified—consensus-based” democracy was still in a delicate, experimental phase. (So said an article, “Occupation for Dummies,” by Nathan Schneider in the movement’s broadsheet paper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, whose initial print run of 50,000 was paid for by a campaign on Kickstarter.)

It was impossible, of course, not to be swept up in the explosive rapidity of events. And there was little time to adjust to them. By the weekend of October 8, the tenor of the press coverage of the protest had become noticeably more respectful. And the protesters themselves, living for weeks in an inhospitable city park and withstanding police abuse in the name of ending corporate excess, had taken on to some of the public an aura of heroic innocence. There was no graffiti anywhere, only handmade signs. In my time in the park, I didn’t see any drugs or alcohol, except for a man discreetly drinking beer from a plastic gallon milk jug.

John Minchillo/AP Photo

The computer center for the Occupy Wall Street protests, Zuccotti Park, New York City, October 2, 2011

Seeing me take notes, a tall, elegant, rather knowing man who looked to be in his late forties approached me. He surprised me by introducing himself with his full name—Bill Dobbs. (His e-mail address was “duchamp,” a clue to his mindset.) He told me he had been an AIDS activist in the late 1980s, and for Occupy Wall Street he was involved in “outreach to the press.”

Read the whole article.

The Cultural Self - Different Cultures, Different Selves

I've been making this point on and off now for a couple of years - and have long felt that there is no "me" without a "you" (or as Buber put it, no "I" without a 'Thou").

When I discovered Jerome Bruner, Kenneth Gergen, Rom Harre, and Lev Vygotsky (among many others), it all finally came together as cultural psychology. It seems more and more people are beginning to understand that the "self" is not simply pre-programmed to emerge in a series of innate structures. There are definitely some elements of this - you are not likely to find a three-year-old exhibiting post-formal cognition.

On the other hand, we're not likely to see too many people reaching post-formal cognition and ego development unless we do something to make this possible - higher development requires appropriate life conditions, i.e., culture.

I found this old episode of Philosophy Talk at Church of the Churchless - it's a great discussion featuring Hazel Markus: Different Cultures, Different Selves. Unfortunately, we have to buy the episode (on sale right now for $1.29). We can get new episodes for free each week as downloads.

Different Cultures, Different Selves

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Guest: Hazel Markus; Professor of Psychology; Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; and Director

Why do we do what we do? To please others? To live up to what culture expects? Or for our own reasons as "autonomous agents"? Americans tend to admire (at least in theory) the autonomous individual, the person who knows what he wants, and sets out to get it, no matter what the world might think. Is this true of all cultures? John and Ken are joined by Stanford Psychologist Hazel Markus to explore differences in motivation and action across cultures.

Original Airdate 02/22/2009

This is from Dr. Markus' web page - in presenting a culture-based version of psyche, she approaches an integral model - or at least provides a piece sort of missing from Wilber's model.

Mutual Constitution of Culture and Psyche
Related Publications

Hazel works in the area of cultural psychology, which explores the interdependence between psychological structures and processes and sociocultural environments. Hazel and her colleagues investigate how people are shaped by culture as they engage with its patterns of meaning and practices; how people require and are shaped by engagement with the culture-specific meanings, practices, artifacts, and institutions of particular contexts; and how psychological tendencies serve to perpetuate these particular cultural contexts. This dynamic relationship between culture and the psyche or self is called the framework of mutual constitution.

Hazel and her colleagues have conducted extensive research comparing the psychological processes of Westerners and East Asians, demonstrating that European American models of independence and East Asian models of interdependence emphasize very different conceptions of the self and social relations. Hazel evaluates strategies for understanding the links between culture and psyche, and how the human brain has evolved to use cultural models that enable people to coordinate and cooperate in diverse culture-specific adaptations. She has studied cultural models of self, competence, motivation, conflict, and well-being as significant features of cultural contexts that fashion individual experience. As a cultural psychologist, Hazel asks questions such as: What is a person? What is the source of individual variation in behavior? And what meaning is attached to this variation in behavior? Depending on the cultural context (e.g., national origin, ethnic background, or social class) these questions are answered differently for different people.

Tags: The Cultural Self, Different Cultures, Different Selves, Hazel Markus, Stanford, Mutual Constitution of Culture and Psyche, Philosophy Talk, Church of the Churchless, Psychology, culture, identity, Self, individualism, collectivism, cultural psychology, Jerome Bruner, Kenneth Gergen, Rom Harre, Lev Vygotsky

Otto F. Von Feigenblatt - Forgiveness and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Cool . . . and the author's name is so European. :) Seriously, though, this is a very interesting article looking at the ways forgiveness varies from one culture to another.

Here is the full citation:
Von Feigenblatt, O.F. (2010, Dec. 15). Forgiveness and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Journal of History & Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1; Available at SSRN:http://ssrn.com/abstract=1749687

Forgiveness and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Otto F. Von Feigenblatt
Nova Southeastern University; Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences; Millenia Atlantic University

December 15, 2010

Journal of History & Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, July-December 2010

Abstract:
Forgiveness is a contested concept. Psychologists tend to separate it from the related process of reconciliation and to emphasize the intrapersonal aspects of the phenomenon. On the other hand theologians and philosophers see an important connection between forgiveness and reconciliation due to relational factors. Culture adds further complexity to the study of forgiveness in that it questions the universality of dominant understandings of the concept, developed from a Western perspective, which are based on individualist values by testing those understandings in a collectivist context. This brief essay concludes with a brief representative illustration of forgiveness in traditional Japanese villages.

Here is the Introduction, to whet your appetite.

Introduction:
Forgiveness is one of those concepts that are part of common knowledge but that mean something dissimilar to different people. A Catholic Priest may hold a view of forgiveness that is inherently connected to religion while a psychologist may view forgiveness as an individual process that helps a client improve his or her mental health.

Furthermore, a political scientist involved in post-conflict reconstruction would probably view forgiveness as a necessary prerequisite to rebuild a vibrant civil society [Grodsky, 2009; Minear, 1991] or a philosopher, the act of forgiveness may be of greater importance for the offender than for the victim since it marks a return to the moral community. Those are just some of the many different understandings of forgiveness not including subtypes and nearly infinite cultural variants.

The following sections will compare and contrast some of the well known views of forgiveness such as the traditional psychological view, the theological perspective, and the philosophical approach. A final section will deal with culture and how it influences forgiveness in traditional Japanese villages.

PDF download.

Tags: Psychology, culture, forgiveness, individualism, collectivism, Otto Von Feigenblatt, Forgiveness and Culture, Interdisciplinary, Dialogue, Journal of History & Social Sciences, Social Science Research Network, SSRN, philosophy, theology

All in the Mind - Challenging Stereotypes: culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 2 of 2)

Here is part 2 of this excellent discussion - in my repost of part 1, I included some background information to offer a frame of reference, so I will include that here as well.

* * * * *

Some definitions might help - all of the following information comes from this excellent article:

Oyserman, D., Coon, H.M., & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking Individualism and Collectivism: Evaluation of Theoretical Assumptions and Meta-Analyses. Psychological Bulletin; Vol. 128, No. 1, 3–72. DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.128.1.3

I'm not sure if this is available online for free access or not - I can't find it in an open access search.

And these come from the same article, but are more general definitions, and not based on a research model (as is the chart above, which gives sample items for a measure).

Individualism
The core element of individualism is the assumption that individuals are independent of one another. From this core, a number of plausible consequences or implications of individualism can be discerned. One question we explore further is whether research has empirically validated these plausible consequences or implications and whether these plausible consequences are, in fact, universally part of individualism.

Hofstede (1980) defined individualism as a focus on rights above duties, a concern for oneself and immediate family, an emphasis on personal autonomy and self-fulfillment, and the basing of one’s identity on one’s personal accomplishments. Waterman (1984) defined normative individualism as a focus on personal responsibility and freedom of choice, living up to one’s
potential, and respecting the integrity of others. Schwartz (1990) defined individualistic societies as fundamentally contractual, consisting of narrow primary groups and negotiated social relations, with specific obligations and expectations focusing on achieving status. These definitions all conceptualize individualism as a worldview that centralizes the personal—personal goals, personal uniqueness, and personal control—and peripheralizes the social (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Hsu, 1983; Kagitcibasi, 1994; U. Kim, 1994; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sampson, 1977; Triandis, 1995).

* * * *

Collectivism
The core element of collectivism is the assumption that groups bind and mutually obligate individuals. From this core, theorists discern a number of plausible consequences or implications of collectivism. One question we explore further is whether research has empirically validated these plausible consequences or implications cross-culturally and whether these plausible consequences are, in fact, universal consequences of collectivism.

Although sometimes seen as simple opposites, it is probably more accurate to conceptualize individualism and collectivism as worldviews that differ in the issues they make salient (Kagitcibasi, 1987, 1997; Kwan & Singelis, 1998). According to Schwartz (1990), collectivist societies are communal societies characterized by diffuse and mutual obligations and expectations based on ascribed statuses. In these societies, social units with common fate, common goals, and common values are centralized; the personal is simply a component of the social, making the in-group the key unit of analysis (e.g., Triandis, 1995). This description focuses on collectivism as a social way of being, oriented toward in-groups and away from out-groups (Oyserman, 1993). Because in-groups can include family, clan, ethnic, religious, or other groups, Hui (1988) and Triandis (1995), among others, have proposed that collectivism is a diverse construct, joining together culturally disparate foci on different kinds and levels of referent groups. In this way, collectivism may refer to a broader range of values, attitudes, and behaviors than individualism.

Plausible consequences of collectivism for psychology—self-concept, well-being, attribution style, and relationality—are easily discerned. First, with regard to the self, collectivism implies that (a) group membership is a central aspect of identity (Hofstede, 1980; Hsu, 1983; U. Kim, 1994; Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and (b) valued personal traits reflect the goals of collectivism, such as sacrifice for the common good and maintaining harmonious relationships with close others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Oyserman, 1993; Triandis, 1995). Second, with regard to well-being and emotional expression, collectivism implies that (a) life satisfaction derives from successfully carrying out social roles and obligations and avoiding failures in these domains (U. Kim, 1994; Kwan & Singelis, 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and (b) restraint in emotional expression, rather than open and direct expression of personal feelings, is likely to be valued as a means of ensuring in-group harmony.

Third, with regard to judgment, causal reasoning, and attributions, definitions of collectivism suggest that (a) social context, situational constraints, and social roles figure prominently in person perception and causal reasoning (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994) and (b) meaning is contextualized and memory is likely to contain richly embedded detail. Last, with regard to relationality, definitions of collectivism imply that (a) important group memberships are ascribed and fixed, viewed as “facts of life” to which people must accommodate; (b) boundaries between in-groups and out-groups are stable, relatively impermeable, and important; and (c) in-group exchanges are based on equality or even generosity principles (U. Kim, 1994; Morris & Leung, 2000; Sayle, 1998; Triandis, 1995).

That should provide some background for the discussion in today's show from All in the Mind.

* * * * *

Challenging Stereotypes: culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 2 of 2)

Listen Now - 2010-08-14 |Download Audio - 14082010

We can't escape our cultural heritage, and yet it's more malleable than you might think. It's there in everything we do and say -- from the boardroom tables of big business to conversations with your GP. How are scientists getting inside our cultural mindsets to study them? Brain scans have entered the fray.

Show Transcript | Hide Transcript

Transcripts are published on Wednesdays, and audio on Saturdays after broadcast.

Guests

Professor Steven Heine
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia, Canada
http://heine.socialpsychology.org/

Professor Daphna Oyserman
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan, United States
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/daphna.oyserman/home

Professor Shihui Han
Director, Cultural and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Peking University, China
http://www.psy.pku.edu.cn/LABS/CSCN_lab/people.html

Assistant Professor Takahiko Masuda
Department of Psychology
University of Alberta, Canada
http://www.ualberta.ca/~tmasuda/

Dr Deborah Ko
Department of Psychology
University of Hong Kong
http://www3.hku.hk/psychodp/people/profile.php?person=deborahko

Further Information

All in the Mind blog with Natasha Mitchell
A place to engage, or you can add your comments directly above too (look for Add Your Comment). Features extra audio this week of blog only interviews on the individualist / collectivist dichotomy, on differences in approaches to learning, and in various cultural assessments of what it means to be human.

Challenging Stereotypes: culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 1 of 2)
Part 1 of this 2 part series

XXth Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology
Held in Melbourne, Australia, 2010.

Publications

Title: Cultural difference in neural mechanisms of self-recognition
Author: Sui, J., Liu, C. H., Han, S.
Social Neuroscience, (2009) (in press)

Title: The bi-cultural self and the bi-cultural brain
Author: Ng. S. H., Han, S., in Wyer, R. S., Chiu, C.-y., & Hong, Y.-y (Eds.)
'Problems and solutions in cross-cultural theory, research and application', New York: Psychology Press, pp 329-342, New York: Psychology Press

Title: Cultural differences in the self: From philosophy to psychology and neuroscience
Author: Zhu, Y., Han, S.
URL: http://bit.ly/aAEDB9
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 2008, pp 1799-1811 Note: The link is a PDF

Title: Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: A transcultural neuroimaging approach
Author: Zhu, Y., Han, S.
Publisher: Nature Review Neuroscience, 9, 2008, pp 646-654
URL: http://bit.ly/clWTOV
Note: The link is a PDF

Title: Cognition, communication, and culture: Implications for the survey response process
Author: Schwarz, N., Oyserman, D., & Peytcheva, E.
Publisher: in 'Survey Methods in Multinational, Multiregional, and Multicultural Contexts' edited by Harkness et al, John Wiley and Sons Inc, 2010.
URL: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/oysermanlab/files/10_ch_schwarz_et_al_culture___survey_response_3mc.pdf

Title: Connecting and Separating Mind-Sets: Culture as Situated Cognition
Author: Daphna Oyserman, Nicholas Sorensen, Rolf Reber, Sylvia Xiaohua Chen
Publisher: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 97, No. 2, 2009, pp 217-235
URL: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/daphna.oyserman/files/oysermansorensenreberchenjpsp2009.pdf

Title: Does Culture Influence What and How We Think? Effects of Priming Individualism and Collectivism
Author: Daphna Oyserman and Spike W. S. Lee
Publisher: Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 134, No. 2, 2008, pp 311-342
URL: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/daphna.oyserman/files/oyserman_lee_2008_psychbulletin.pdf

Title: Is there a Universal Need for Positive Self Regard?
Author: Steven J. Heine, Darrin R. Lehman, Hazel Markus, Shinobu Kitayama
Publisher: Psychological Review, 106 (4), pp. 766-794, 1999.
URL: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/docs/1999universal_need.pdf
Note: The link is a PDF file.

Presenter

Natasha Mitchell

Tags: Psychology, brain, mind, culture, collectivism, individualism, All in the Mind, Challenging Stereotypes, Asian Self, Part 2 of 2, Natasha Mitchell, Deborah Ko, Takahiko Masuda, Shihui Han, Daphna Oyserman, Steven Heine, cultural heritage

All in the Mind - East? West? How do YOU think? The science of culture & cognition

I'm looking forward to the 2nd part of this series - in the meantime, here is a related post from the blog - with some out-takes from the first episode last Saturday.

I blogged last week's episode with some added definitions of individualist and collectivist.

East? West? How do YOU think? The science of culture & cognition

Pic: Fwooper via Flickr Creative Commons.

This week's show is the second in our 2 parter from the recent Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology.

Last week we delved into the question of self esteem, and whether it varies across cultures.

Do East Asians, for example, require less self esteem than Westerners because they occupy a more collectivist setting and state of mind? That's been the basis for a provocative debate in psychology circles, originally sparked by the research of Professor Steven Heine and colleagues. Tune in to hear about it.

An interesting discussion is unfolding over on the All in the Mind website in response. I invited you to share your own experiences or thoughts, and thanks for doing just that!

Brazza writes

"I do find this a compelling discussion, as one who works with people of all ages in an interface between pacific islanders and longer term Australian residents. In working on organisational strategy, it is very clear that well being is valued and that self esteem has little register as an idea. Well being equates more to collectivist values, such as family, extended family and the group's desire for excellence".

Susan says

I'm an Anglo Australian but I've lived in China for four years and the Middle East two. I feel very much at home in both cultures. Of course, I am not Chinese or Arabic or Armenian etc, because I can't 'swim' in those languages or cultures, but I can still feel a genuine heart-felt link with people in or from those societies....

Brendan offers

"Reflecting on the experiences as a typical person grown up in the west but with an eastern background. I do believe self-esteem exist in all cultures, no matter how the concept is interpreted. To some extent, self-esteem is common and can be interrupted universally. However, the question is really to what degree self-esteem exist in the east or west??? Rather, implying if they do exist at all in the east".

Tara says

"I have lived outside of Australia for the past five years. Currently in Finland and before that Germany. When I lived in Australia I didn't necessarily believe stereotypes and found them quite unfair and perhaps even somewhat racist. I really didn't expect the differences between western cultures to be that big. After living sometime in other cultures and forming personal and work relationships, I really noticed that there are some really core differences between cultures, what people believe, what they are taught, how they act".

Tom reflects

"I was fascinated by the discussion. Particularly, those regarding the research methods. I used to train people in Asia...In Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. My training methods are interactive, and rely on interacting with the class. I found that this was difficult, because people were reluctant to speaking up during the class or offering an opinion. Not a lack of self confidence but more the cultural need to respect the teacher/elder. So I used to hand out yellow stickies for people to write their opinion/answer I made this process a game and anonymous. This worked very well and removed the need for students to speak up openly...."

Read all the comments in full and add more of your own!

When I kicked off All in the Mind, the way in which interpretations of the mind and mental illness vary with culture were themes that especially inspired me with possibilities, and was the basis for an early series I made in India (Part 1, 2, 3 and 4), amongst other shows.

American journalist Ethan Watters perhaps gets to the heart of why it all interests me so much in his new book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalisation of the American Psyche, when he writes "we should worry about this loss of diversity in the world's differing conceptions and treatments of mental illness in exactly the same way we worry about the loss of biological diversity in nature...like those plants and animals, the diversity in the human understanding of the mind can disappear before we've truly comprehended its value".

That's not to romanticise the experience of mental illness in any culture, but more to acknowledge we're possibly as diverse cognitively as we are culturally. Ethan is my guest on the show shortly. He popped into a San Francisco studio for me this week. I sounded like Snuffleupagus with the head cold we've all copped at work, but he was lucid and incisive!

This week, we're picking up from where we left the last show, and asking whether it's possible to step outside our own cultural skins in order to objectively study cultural influences on how we think?

And, we're contemplating how malleable the cultural mindsets are that we're born into. Are we more cognitively fluid than we give ourselves credit for? Think of all those expats, refugees, immigrants, migrants who manage to repopulate their minds as they relocate themselves to new lands.

The indefatigable Corinne Podger, who works on All in the Mind with me for half of her week at the moment, and over at Radio Australia reporting on the Asia-Pacific region for the other days, has interviewed a host of leading East Asian and North American psychologists for the show.

Passing through airports I see endless shelves of "Doing business with...Insert Culture X" books. In the world's boardrooms there's much interest in understanding the cultural nuances of business exchanges. As there is in the increasingly diverse classroom setting, as you'll hear.

Brain scans have even entered the fray.

Tune in.

As promised, here are some extra interviews Corinne did which we're publishing exclusively on the blog.

What does it mean to be human? What traits do you think are the most important in defining "humanness"? Is it the capacity for rational thought and logic, or is it more to do with emotions and warmth, with our “humanity”? Paul Bain at Murdoch University has teamed up with Nick Haslam from the University of Melbourne, among others, to study how Australians, Chinese and Italians respond to this question differently. It's pertinent for understanding the way in which we are capable of dehumanising others simply because they see the world differently. (Abstract of their paper).

(6 mins) What_does_it_mean_to_be_human

In the mid-1970s, the famous Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede broadly classified Western cultures as “individualist”, and East Asian cultures as “collectivist”. The description has stuck. But what was originally seen as a straightforward dichotomy is becoming more nuanced as Nick and Paul explain.

(4 mins) Collective_individualistic

"Western academics are working with increasingly diverse student populations, as more young people East Asia pursue their studies in Australia, Europe, and North America. That’s exposed a rocky interface between approaches to learning in individualist and collectivist cultures which is of enormous interest to cultural psychologists", says Corinne. Marieke van Egmond is doing her PhD at the University of Bremen in Germany. "She’s found Westerners take a ‘Mind oriented‘ approach to learning, while Asian students have a ‘Virtue oriented’ approach, which can both be traced right back to the ancient philosophical heritages", Corinne adds. Tune in for some tips for educators.

(6 mins) Culture_and_the_classroom

Looking forward to your continuing discussion here on the blog or over on the All in the Mind web

Tags: All in the Mind, East, West, How do YOU think?, The science of culture & cognition, individualist, collectivist, Psychology, culture, individualism, collectivism, worldview, Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, Ethan Watters, philosophy, Natasha Mitchell

All in the Mind - Challenging Stereotypes - Culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 1 of 2)

Nice topic - when I was researching the available information on individualist vs collectivist cultures, I was surprised to find that Japanese people, for example, are just as individualist as Americans - and multi-generational Americans are no less collectivist than Japanese, and more collectivist than European-Americans.

Some definitions might help - all of the following information comes from this excellent article:

Oyserman, D., Coon, H.M., & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking Individualism and Collectivism: Evaluation of Theoretical Assumptions and Meta-Analyses. Psychological Bulletin; Vol. 128, No. 1, 3–72. DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.128.1.3

I'm not sure if this is available online for free access or not - I can't it in an open access search.

And these come from the same article, but are more general definitions, and not based on a research model (as is the chart above, which gives sample items for a measure).

Individualism
The core element of individualism is the assumption that individuals are independent of one another. From this core, a number of plausible consequences or implications of individualism can be discerned. One question we explore further is whether research has empirically validated these plausible consequences or implications and whether these plausible consequences are, in fact, universally part of individualism.

Hofstede (1980) defined individualism as a focus on rights above duties, a concern for oneself and immediate family, an emphasis on personal autonomy and self-fulfillment, and the basing of one’s identity on one’s personal accomplishments. Waterman (1984) defined normative individualism as a focus on personal responsibility and freedom of choice, living up to one’s
potential, and respecting the integrity of others. Schwartz (1990) defined individualistic societies as fundamentally contractual, consisting of narrow primary groups and negotiated social relations, with specific obligations and expectations focusing on achieving status. These definitions all conceptualize individualism as a worldview that centralizes the personal—personal goals, personal uniqueness, and personal control—and peripheralizes the social (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Hsu, 1983; Kagitcibasi, 1994; U. Kim, 1994; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sampson, 1977; Triandis, 1995).

* * * *

Collectivism
The core element of collectivism is the assumption that groups bind and mutually obligate individuals. From this core, theorists discern a number of plausible consequences or implications of collectivism. One question we explore further is whether research has empirically validated these plausible consequences or implications cross-culturally and whether these plausible consequences are, in fact, universal consequences of collectivism.

Although sometimes seen as simple opposites, it is probably more accurate to conceptualize individualism and collectivism as worldviews that differ in the issues they make salient (Kagitcibasi, 1987, 1997; Kwan & Singelis, 1998). According to Schwartz (1990), collectivist societies are communal societies characterized by diffuse and mutual obligations and expectations based on ascribed statuses. In these societies, social units with common fate, common goals, and common values are centralized; the personal is simply a component of the social, making the in-group the key unit of analysis (e.g., Triandis, 1995). This description focuses on collectivism as a social way of being, oriented toward in-groups and away from out-groups (Oyserman, 1993). Because in-groups can include family, clan, ethnic, religious, or other groups, Hui (1988) and Triandis (1995), among others, have proposed that collectivism is a diverse construct, joining together culturally disparate foci on different kinds and levels of referent groups. In this way, collectivism may refer to a broader range of values, attitudes, and behaviors than individualism.

Plausible consequences of collectivism for psychology—self-concept, well-being, attribution style, and relationality—are easily discerned. First, with regard to the self, collectivism implies that (a) group membership is a central aspect of identity (Hofstede, 1980; Hsu, 1983; U. Kim, 1994; Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and (b) valued personal traits reflect the goals of collectivism, such as sacrifice for the common good and maintaining harmonious relationships with close others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Oyserman, 1993; Triandis, 1995). Second, with regard to well-being and emotional expression, collectivism implies that (a) life satisfaction derives from successfully carrying out social roles and obligations and avoiding failures in these domains (U. Kim, 1994; Kwan & Singelis, 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and (b) restraint in emotional expression, rather than open and direct expression of personal feelings, is likely to be valued as a means of ensuring in-group harmony.

Third, with regard to judgment, causal reasoning, and attributions, definitions of collectivism suggest that (a) social context, situational constraints, and social roles figure prominently in person perception and causal reasoning (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994) and (b) meaning is contextualized and memory is likely to contain richly embedded detail. Last, with regard to relationality, definitions of collectivism imply that (a) important group memberships are ascribed and fixed, viewed as “facts of life” to which people must accommodate; (b) boundaries between in-groups and out-groups are stable, relatively impermeable, and important; and (c) in-group exchanges are based on equality or even generosity principles (U. Kim, 1994; Morris & Leung, 2000; Sayle, 1998; Triandis, 1995).

That should provide some background for the discussion in today's show from All in the Mind.

Challenging Stereotypes - Culture, psychology and the Asian Self (Part 1 of 2)

Listen Now - 2010-08-07 |Download Audio - 07082010

As East and West meet across the boardroom tables of big business, there's growing interest in how culture shapes the psyche and Self. If you're born into a collectivist or individualistic society, do you think differently? This week, controversial research on self esteem. Do East Asians need less of it to feel good about themselves?

Show Transcript | Hide Transcript

Transcripts are available on Wednesdays, and audio is available on Saturday directly after broadcast.

Guests

Professor Steven Heine
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia, Canada
http://heine.socialpsychology.org/

Associate Professor Masaki Yuki
Department of Behavioural Science / Centre for Experimental Research in Social Sciences
Hokkaido University, Japan
http://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~myuki/

Dr Deborah Ko
Department of Psychology
University of Hong Kong
http://www3.hku.hk/psychodp/people/profile.php?person=deborahko

Assistant Professor Yuri Miyamoto
Department of Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
http://psych.wisc.edu/faculty/bio/kmMiyamoto.html

Professor Susumu Yamaguchi
Department of Social Psychology,
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
University of Tokyo, Japan
http://www-socpsy.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/yamaguchi/index-e.htm

Professor Huajian Cai
Sun Yat-Sen University
Guangzhou, China

Assistant Professor Takahiko Masuda
Department of Psychology
University of Alberta, Canada
http://www.ualberta.ca/~tmasuda/

Further Information

XXth Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology
Held in Melbourne, Australia, 2010.

All in the Mind blog with Natasha Mitchell
A place to engage, or you can add your comments directly above too (look for Add Your Comment).

Publications

Title: Nationality and espoused values of managers
Author: Geert J. Hofstede
Publisher: Journal of Applied Psychology, 61, 148-155, 1976.
URL: http://is.gd/e3GaF

Title: Is there a Universal Need for Positive Self Regard?
Author: Steven J. Heine, Darrin R. Lehman, Hazel Markus, Shinobu Kitayama
Publisher: Psychological Review, 106 (4), pp. 766-794, 1999.
URL: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/docs/1999universal_need.pdf
Note: The link is a PDF file.

Title: Apparent Universality of Positive Implicit Self-Esteem
Author: Susumu Yamaguchi, Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Fumio Murakami, Daniel Chen, Kimihiro Shiomura, Chihiro Kobayashi, Huajian Cai, Anne Krendl
Publisher: Psychological Science, 18, pp. 498-500, June 2007.
URL: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.158.9773&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Title: Is self-esteem a universal need? Evidence from The People's Republic of China
Author: Huajian Cai, Qiuping Wu, Jonathon D. Brown
Publisher: Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 12 Issue 2, Pages 104 - 120, May 2009.
URL: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122384486/abstract

Title: Why do Westerners self-enhance more than East Asians?
Author: Falk, C.F., Heine, S.J., Yuki, M., & Takemura, K.
Publisher: European Journal of Personality, 23, 183-203, 2009.
URL: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122312878/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Title: The influence of culture: Holistic versus analytic perception
Author: Nisbett, R. E. & Miyamoto, Y.
Publisher: Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 467-473, 2005.
URL: http://is.gd/e3Gpa

Presenter

Natasha Mitchell

Tags: Psychology, culture, perspectives, individualism, collectivism, All in the Mind, Challenging Stereotypes, Culture, psychology, Asian Self, Part 1 of 2, Natasha Mitchell, Takahiko Masuda, Huajian Cai, Susumu Yamaguchi, Yuri Miyamoto, Deborah Ko, Masaki Yuki, Steven Heine, self-esteem