This Further Reflections piece was invited by the Editors of the journal to provide additional consideration of some of the significant issues under study in “Culture Moderates the Relation Between ...Gender Inequality and Well-Being” (Li et al., 2021) available online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620972492 and on pages 823 to 835 of this issue. Further Reflections are not commentaries on a particular article, though they are inspired by one. Rather, they provide broader perspectives on issues considered in Research Articles, beyond those that authors are able to provide in the Introduction and Discussion sections of their articles. The Editors’ objective with Further Reflections is that they will raise the level of conversation around psychological issues of societal importance. Further Reflections are by invitation only.
American = Independent? Markus, Hazel Rose
Perspectives on psychological science,
09/2017, Volume:
12, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
U.S. American cultures and psyches reflect and promote independence. Devos and Banaji (2005) asked, does American equal White? This article asks, does American equal independent? The answer is that ...when compared to people in East Asian or South Asian contexts, people in American contexts tend to show an independent psychological signature—a sense of self as individual, separate, influencing others and the world, free from influence, and equal to, if not better than, others (Markus & Conner, 2013). Independence is a reasonable description of the selves of people in the White, middle-class American mainstream. Yet it is a less good characterization of the selves of the majority of Americans who are working-class and/or people of color. A cultural psychological approach reveals that much of North American psychology is still grounded in an independent model of the self and, as such, neglects social contexts and the psychologies of a majority of Americans. Given the prominence of independence in American ideas and institutions, the interdependent tendencies that arise from intersections of national culture with social class, race, and ethnicity go unrecognized and are often misunderstood and stigmatized. This unseen clash of independence and interdependence is a significant factor in many challenges, including those of education, employment, health, immigration, criminal justice, and political polarization.
Americans live in a political, social, and historical context that values personal freedom and choice above all else, an emphasis that has been amplified by contemporary psychology. However, this ...article reviews research that shows that in non‐Western cultures and among working‐class Westerners, freedom and choice do not have the meaning or importance they do for the university‐educated people who have been the subjects of almost all research on this topic. We cannot assume that choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerners, is a universal aspiration. The meaning and significance of choice are cultural constructions. Moreover, even when choicecanfoster freedom, empowerment, and independence, it is not an unalloyed good. Too much choice can produce a paralyzing uncertainty, depression, and selfishness. In the United States, the path to well‐being may require that we strike a balance between the positive and negative consequences of proliferating choice in every domain of life.
The United States suffers high rates of preventable lifestyle disease despite widespread calls for people to take responsibility for their health. The United States also stands out in its rejection ...of government action to guide industry practices and consumer choices. Why? We examine how deeply rooted cultural narratives about “free choice” and “personal responsibility” infuse policymaking, advertising, media, social norms, and individual attitudes about health in the United States. We argue that these narratives contribute to ill health in the United States: They encourage stress and worry over health, blame and stigmatization of the unhealthy, widened health disparities, and the failure to adopt policies that could save lives. Psychologists can play a major role in expanding narratives about health so that they include the role of personal choice and responsibility but also reflect current science about the physical, social, and cultural drivers of health. These broader narratives can be used to promote a more comprehensive understanding of health and to better inform the design, communication, and implementation of effective health-supportive policies.
America's unprecedented levels of inequality have far-reaching negative consequences for society as a whole. Although differential access to resources contributes to inequality, the current review ...illuminates how ongoing participation in different social class contexts also gives rise to culture-specific selves and patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. We integrate a growing body of interdisciplinary research to reveal how social class culture cycles operate over the course of the lifespan and through critical gateway contexts, including homes, schools, and workplaces. We first document how each of these contexts socializes social class cultural differences. Then, we demonstrate how these gateway institutions, which could provide access to upward social mobility, are structured according to middle-class ways of being a self and thus can fuel and perpetuate inequality. We conclude with a discussion of intervention opportunities that can reduce inequality by taking into account the contextual responsiveness of the self.
In this article, we approach the relationship between neoliberalism and psychological science from the theoretical perspective of cultural psychology. In the first section, we trace how engagement ...with neoliberal systems results in characteristic tendencies—including a radical ion of self from social and material context, an entrepreneurial understanding of self as an ongoing development project, an imperative for personal growth and fulfillment, and an emphasis on affect management for self‐regulation—that increasingly constitute the knowledge base of mainstream psychological science. However, as we consider in the second section, psychological science is not just an observer of neoliberalism and its impact on psychological experience. Instead, by studying psychological processes independent of cultural–ecological or historical context and by championing individual growth and affective regulation as the key to optimal well‐being, psychological scientists reproduce and reinforce the influence and authority of neoliberal systems. Rather than a disinterested bystander, hegemonic forms of psychological science are thoroughly implicated in the neoliberal project.
American universities increasingly admit first-generation college students whose parents do not have 4-year degrees. Once admitted, these students tend to struggle academically, compared with ...continuing-generation students-students who have at least 1 parent with a 4-year degree. We propose a cultural mismatch theory that identifies 1 important source of this social class achievement gap. Four studies test the hypothesis that first-generation students underperform because interdependent norms from their mostly working-class backgrounds constitute a mismatch with middle-class independent norms prevalent in universities. First, assessing university cultural norms, surveys of university administrators revealed that American universities focus primarily on norms of independence. Second, identifying the hypothesized cultural mismatch, a longitudinal survey revealed that universities' focus on independence does not match first-generation students' relatively interdependent motives for attending college and that this cultural mismatch is associated with lower grades. Finally, 2 experiments at both private and public universities created a match or mismatch for first-generation students and examined the performance consequences. Together these studies revealed that representing the university culture in terms of independence (i.e., paving one's own paths) rendered academic tasks difficult and, thereby, undermined first-generation students' performance. Conversely, representing the university culture in terms of interdependence (i.e., being part of a community) reduced this sense of difficulty and eliminated the performance gap without adverse consequences for continuing-generation students. These studies address the urgent need to recognize cultural obstacles that contribute to the social class achievement gap and to develop interventions to address them.
Many Americans, holding fast to the American Dream and the promise of equal opportunity, claim that social class doesn’t matter. Yet the ways we talk and dress, our interactions with authority ...figures, the degree of trust we place in strangers, our religious beliefs, our achievements, our senses of morality and of ourselves—all are marked by social class, a powerful factor affecting every domain of life. In Facing Social Class, social psychologists Susan Fiske and Hazel Rose Markus, and a team of sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and legal scholars, examine the many ways we communicate our class position to others and how social class shapes our daily, face-to-face interactions—from casual exchanges to interactions at school, work, and home. Facing Social Class exposes the contradiction between the American ideal of equal opportunity and the harsh reality of growing inequality, and it shows how this tension is reflected in cultural ideas and values, institutional practices, everyday social interactions, and psychological tendencies. Contributor Joan Williams examines cultural differences between middle- and working-class people and shows how the cultural gap between social class groups can influence everything from voting practices and political beliefs to work habits, home life, and social behaviors. In a similar vein, Annette Lareau and Jessica McCrory Calarco analyze the cultural advantages or disadvantages exhibited by different classes in institutional settings, such as those between parents and teachers. They find that middle-class parents are better able to advocate effectively for their children in school than are working-class parents, who are less likely to challenge a teacher’s authority. Michael Kraus, Michelle Rheinschmidt, and Paul Piff explore the subtle ways we signal class status in social situations. Conversational style and how close one person stands to another, for example, can influence the balance of power in a business interaction. Diana Sanchez and Julie Garcia even demonstrate that markers of low socioeconomic status such as incarceration or unemployment can influence whether individuals are categorized as white or black—a finding that underscores how race and class may work in tandem to shape advantage or disadvantage in social interactions. The United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality and one of the lowest levels of social mobility among industrialized nations, yet many Americans continue to buy into the myth that theirs is a classless society. Facing Social Class faces the reality of how social class operates in our daily lives, why it is so pervasive, and what can be done to alleviate its effects.
The literature on social class disparities in health and education contains 2 underlying, yet often opposed, models of behavior: the individual model and the structural model. These models refer to ...largely unacknowledged assumptions about the sources of human behavior that are foundational to research and interventions. Our review and theoretical integration proposes that, in contrast to how the 2 models are typically represented, they are not opposed, but instead they are complementary sets of understandings that inform and extend each other. Further, we elaborate the theoretical rationale and predictions for a third model: the
sociocultural self
model of behavior. This model incorporates and extends key tenets of the individual and structural models. First, the sociocultural self model conceptualizes individual characteristics (e.g., skills) and structural conditions (e.g., access to resources) as interdependent forces that mutually constitute each other and that are best understood together. Second, the sociocultural self model recognizes that both individual characteristics and structural conditions indirectly influence behavior through the selves that emerge in the situation. These selves are malleable psychological states that are a product of the ongoing mutual constitution of individuals and structures and serve to guide people's behavior by systematically shaping how people construe situations. The theoretical foundation of the sociocultural self model lays the groundwork for a more complete understanding of behavior and provides new tools for developing interventions that will reduce social class disparities in health and education. The model predicts that intervention efforts will be more effective at producing sustained behavior change when (a) current selves are congruent, rather than incongruent, with the desired behavior and (b) individual characteristics and structural conditions provide ongoing support for the selves that are necessary to support the desired behavior.
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