AP Psychology

Module 59 – Social-Cognitive Theories and Exploring the Self

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Social-Cognitive Theories

FOCUS QUESTION: Who first proposed the social-cognitive perspective, and how do social-cognitive theorists view personality development?

Today’s psychological science views individuals as biopsychosocial organisms. The social-cognitive perspective on personality proposed by Albert Bandura (1986, 2006, 2008) emphasizes the interaction of our traits with our situations. Much as nature and nurture always work together, so do individuals and their situations.

Those who take the behavioral approach to personality development emphasize the effects of learning. We are conditioned to repeat certain behaviors, and we learn by observing and imitating others. For example, a child with a very controlling parent may learn to follow orders rather than think independently, and may exhibit a more timid personality.

Social-cognitive theorists do consider the behavioral perspective, including others’ influence. (That’s the “social” part.) However, they also emphasize the importance of mental processes: What we think about our situations affects our behavior. (That’s the “cognitive” part.) Instead of focusing solely on how our environment controls us, as behaviorists do, social-cognitive theorists focus on how we and our environment interact: How do we interpret and respond to external events? How do our schemas, our memories, and our expectations influence our behavior patterns?

Reciprocal Influences

Bandura (1986, 2006) views the person-environment interaction as reciprocal determinism. “Behavior, internal personal factors, and environmental influences,” he said, “all operate as interlocking determinants of each other” (FIGURE 59.1). For example, children’s TV viewing habits (past behavior) influence their viewing preferences (internal factor), which influence how television (environmental factor) affects their current behavior. The influences are mutual.

Consider three specific ways in which individuals and environments interact:

  1. Different people choose different environments. The school you attend, the reading you do, the TV programs you watch, the music you listen to, the friends you associate with-all are part of an environment you participated in choosing, based partly on your dispositions (Funder, 2009; Ickes et al., 1997). You choose your environment and it then shapes you.
  2. Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events. Anxious people, for example, are attuned to potentially threatening events (Eysenck et al., 1987). Thus, they perceive the world as threatening, and they react accordingly.
  3. Our personalities help create situations to which we react. Many experiments reveal that how we view and treat people influences how they in turn treat us. If we expect to the study of personality As someone to be angry with us, we may give the person a cold shoulder, touching off the very anger we expect. If we have an easygoing, positive disposition, we will likely enjoy close, supportive friendships (Donnellan et al., 2005; Kendler, 1997).

In such ways, we are both the products and the architects of our environments.

If all this has a familiar ring, it may be because it parallels and reinforces a pervasive theme in psychology and in this book: Behavior emerges from the interplay of external and internal influences. Boiling water turns an egg hard and a potato soft. A threatening environment turns one person into a hero, another into a scoundrel. Extraverts enjoy greater well-being in an extraverted culture than an introverted one (Fulmer et al., 2010) . At every moment, our behavior is influenced by our biology, our social and cultural experiences, and our cognition and dispositions (FIGURE 59.2).

Optimism Versus Pessimism

Recall from Module 29 that we learn to cope with life’s challenges in various ways. In studying how we interact with our environment, social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our sense of personal control – whether we learn to see ourselves as controlling, or as controlled by, our environment. One measure of how helpless or effective you feel is where you stand on optimism-pessimism. How do you characteristically explain negative and positive events? Perhaps you have known students whose attributional style is pessimistic – who attribute poor performance to their lack of ability (“I can’t do this “) or to situations enduringly beyond their control (“There is nothing I can do about it”). Such students are more likely to continue getting low grades than are students who adopt the more hopeful attitude that effort, good Study habits, and self-discipline can make a difference (Noel et al., 1987; Peterson & Barrett, 1987). Mere fantasies do not fuel motivation and success. Realistic positive expectations do (Oettingen & Mayer, 2002).

Attributional style also matters when dating couples wrestle with conflicts. Optimists and their partners see each other as engaging constructively, and they then tend to feel more supported and satisfied with the resolution and with their relationship (Srivastava et al., 2006). Expect good things from others, and often you will get what you expect. Such studies helped point Martin Seligman toward proposing a more positive psychology (see Close-up: Toward a More Positive Psychology on the next page).

EXCESSIVE OPTIMISM

Positive thinking in the face of adversity can pay dividends, but so, too, can a dash of realism (Schneider, 2001). Realistic anxiety over possible future failures can fuel energetic efforts to avoid the dreaded fate (Goodhart, 1986; Norem, 2001; Showers, 1992). Concerned about failing an upcoming test, students may study thoroughly and outperform their equally able but more confident peers. Asian-American students express somewhat greater pessimism than their European-American counterparts, which Edward Chang (2001) suspects helps explain their often impressive academic achievements. Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency. We want our airline pilots to be mindful of worst-possible outcomes.

Excessive optimism can blind us to real risks. Neil Weinstein (1980, 1982, 1996) has shown how our natural positive-thinking bias can promote “an unrealistic optimism about future life events.” Most late adolescents see themselves as much less vulnerable than their peers to the HIV virus that causes AIDS (Abrams, 1991). Most college students perceive themselves as less likely than their average classmate to develop drinking problems, drop out of school, have a heart attack by age 40, or go deeply into debt on their high-interest credit cards (Yang et al., 2006). 1£ overconfident of our ability to control an impulse such as the urge to smoke, we are more likely to expose ourselves to temptations-and to fail (Nordgren et al., 2009). Those who optimistically deny the power and effects of smoking or venture into ill-fated relationships remind us that blind optimism can be self-defeating.

People also display illusory optimism about their groups. Throughout a National Football League season, fans of all teams correctly guessed that other teams would win about 50 percent of the games. But they incorrectly guessed, on average (across teams and weeks), that their own team stood about a 2 in 3 chance of winning (Massey et al., 2011). This optimistic and illogical bias persisted despite their team’s experience and monetary incentives for accuracy.

Our natural positive-thinking bias does seem to vanish, however, when we are bracing ourselves for feedback, such as test results (Carroll et al., 2006). (Have you ever noticed that, as a big game nears its end, the outcome seems more in doubt when your team is ahead than when it is behind?) Positive illusions also vanish after a traumatic personal experience – as they did for victims of a catastrophic California earthquake, who had to give up their illusions of being less vulnerable than others to earthquakes (Helweg-Larsen, 1999).

Close-up: Toward a More Positive Psychology

During its first century, psychology understandably focused much of its attention on understanding and alleviating negative states. Psychologists have studied abuse and anxiety, depression and disease, prejudice and poverty. Since 1887, articles on selected negative emotions have outnumbered those on positive emotions by 17 to 1.

In ages past, notes American Psychological Association past-president Martin Seligman (2002), times of relative peace and prosperity have enabled cultures to turn their attention from repairing weakness and damage to promoting “the highest qualities of life.” Prosperous fifth-century Athens nurtured philosophy and democracy. Flourishing fifteenth-century Florence nurtured great art. Victorian England, flush with the bounty of the British Empire, nurtured honor, discipline, and duty. In this millennium, Seligman believes, thriving Western cultures have a parallel opportunity to create, as a “humane, scientific monument,” a more positive psychology – a psychology concerned not only with weakness and damage but also with strength and virtue. Thanks to his own leadership, the new positive psychology movement has gained strength, with supporters in 77 countries from Croatia to China (IPPA, 2009, 2010; Seligman, 2004, 2011).

Positive psychology shares with humanistic psychology an interest in advancing human fulfillment, but its methodology is scientific. Positive psychology science is exploring

“Positive psychology,” say Seligman and colleagues (2005), “is an umbrella term for the study of positive emotions, positive character traits, and enabling institutions.” Taken together, satisfaction with the past, happiness with the present, and optimism about the future define the movement’s first pillar: positive emotions. Happiness, Seligman argues, is a byproduct of a pleasant, engaged, and meaningful life.

Positive psychology is about building not just a pleasant life, says Seligman, but also a good life that engages one’s skills, and a meaningful life that points beyond oneself. Thus, the second pillar, positive character, focuses on exploring and enhancing creativity, courage, compassion, integrity, self-control, leadership, wisdom, and spirituality.

The third pillar, positive groups, communities, and cultures, seeks to foster a positive social ecology. This includes healthy families, communal neighborhoods, effective schools, socially responsible media, and civil dialogue.

Will psychology have a more positive mission in this century? Without slighting the need to repair damage and cure disease, positive psychology’s proponents hope so. With American Psychologist and British Psychologist special issues devoted to positive psychology; with many new books; with networked scientists working in worldwide research groups; and with prizes, research awards, summer institutes, and a graduate program promoting positive psychology scholarship, these psychologists have reason to be positive.

BLINDNESS TO ONE’S OWN INCOMPETENCE

Ironically, people often are most overconfident when most incompetent. That, say some researchers, is because it often takes competence to recognize competence (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). They found that most students scoring at the low end of grammar and logic tests believed they had scored in the top half. If you do not know what good grammar is, you may be unaware that your grammar is poor. This “ignorance of one’s own incompetence” phenomenon has a parallel, as I can confirm, in hard-of-hearing people’s difficulty recognizing their own hearing loss. We’re not so much “in denial” as we are simply unaware of what we don’t hear. If I fail to hear my friend calling my name, the friend notices my inattention. But for me it’s a nonevent. I hear what I hear-which, to me, seems pretty normal.

The difficulty in recognizing one’s own incompetence helps explain why so many lowscoring students are dumbfounded after doing badly on a test. If you don’t know all the Scrabble word possibilities you’ve overlooked, you may feel pretty smart-until someone points them out. As experiments that re-create this phenomenon have demonstrated, our ignorance of what we don’t know helps sustain our confidence in our own abilities (Caputo & Dunning, 2005). Once part of our self-concept, our self-assessments also influence how we perceive our performance. Thinking we’re good at something drives how we perceive ourselves doing (Critcher & Dunning, 2009).

To judge one’s competence and predict one’s future performance, it pays to invite others’ assessments (Dunning, 2006). Based on studies in which both individuals and their acquaintances predict their future, we can hazard some advice: If you’re an AP psychology student preparing for the exam, and you want to predict how well you will do, don’t rate yourself – ask your teacher for a candid evaluation. If you’re a Naval officer and need to assess your leadership ability – don’t rate yourself, ask your fellow officers. And if you’re in love and want to predict whether it will last, don’t listen to your heart – ask your friends.

Assessing Behavior in Situations

FOCUS QUESTION: How do social-cognitive researchers explore behavior, and what criticism have they faced?

Social-cognitive psychologists explore how people interact with situations. To predict behavior, they often observe behavior in realistic situations.

One ambitious example was the U.S. Army’s World War II strategy for assessing candidates for spy missions. Rather than using paper-and-pencil tests, Army psychologists subjected the candidates to simulated undercover conditions. They tested their ability to handle stress, solve problems, maintain leadership, and withstand intense interrogation without blowing their cover. Although time consuming and expensive, this assessment of behavior in a realistic situation helped predict later success on actual spy missions (OSS Assessment Staff, 1948). Modern studies indicate that assessment center exercises are more revealing of visible dimensions, such as communication ability, than others, such as inner achievement drive (Bowler & Woehr, 2006).

Military and educational organizations and many Fortune 500 companies are adopting assessment center strategies (Bray et al., 1991, 1997; Eurich et al., 2009). AT&T has observed prospective managers doing simulated managerial work. Student teachers are observed and evaluated several times during the term they spend in your school. Many colleges assess students’ potential via internships and student teaching and assess potential faculty members’ teaching abilities by observing them teach. Armies assess their soldiers by observing them during military exercises. Most American cities with populations of 50,000 or more have used assessment centers in evaluating police officers and firefighters (Lowry, 1997).

These procedures exploit the principle that the best means of predicting future behavior is neither a personality test nor an interviewer’s intuition. Rather, it is the person’s past behavior patterns in similar situations (Mischel, 1981; Ouellette & Wood, 1998; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). As long as the situation and the person remain much the same, the best predictor of future job performance is past job performance; the best predictor of future grades is past grades; the best predictor of future aggressiveness is past aggressiveness; the best predictor of drug use in young adulthood is drug use in high school. If you can’t check the person’s past behavior, the next-best thing is to create an assessment situation that simulates the task so you can see how the person handles it (Lievens et al., 2009; Meriac et al., 2008).

Evaluating Social-Cognitive Theories

Social-cognitive theories of personality sensitize researchers to how situations affect, and are affected by, individuals. More than other personality theories, they build from psychological research on learning and cognition. (See TABLE 59.1 for a comparison of personality theories.)

Critics charge that social-cognitive theories focus so much on the situation that they fail to appreciate the person’s inner traits. Where is the person in this view of personality, ask the dissenters, and where are human emotions? True, the situation does guide our behavior. But, say the critics, in many instances our unconscious motives, our emotions, and our pervasive traits shine through. Personality traits have been shown to predict behavior at work, love, and play. Our biologically influenced traits really do matter. Consider Percy Ray Pridgen and Charles Gill. Each faced the same situation: They had jointly won a $90 million lottery jackpot (Harriston, 1993). When Pridgen learned of the winning numbers, he began trembling uncontrollably, huddled with a friend behind a bathroom door while confirming the win, then sobbed. When Gill heard the news, he told his wife and then went to sleep.

* * *

As we have seen, researchers investigate personality using various methods that serve differing purposes. For a synopsis and comparison of these methods, see TABLE 59.2.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: Are you a pessimist? Do you tend to have low expectations and to attribute bad events to your inability or to circumstances beyond your control? Or are you an optimist, perhaps even being excessively optimistic at times? How has either tendency influenced your choices thus far?

TEST YOURSELF: What do social-cognitive psychologists consider the best way to predict a person’s future behavior?

Exploring the Self

FOCUS QUESTION: Why has psychology generated so much research on the self? How important is self-esteem to psychology and to human well-being?

Psychology’s concern with people’s sense of self dates back at least to William James, who devoted more than 100 pages of his 1890 Principles of Psychology to the topic. By 1943, Gordon Allport lamented that the self had become “lost to view.” Although humanistic psychology’s later emphasis on the self did not instigate much scientific research, it did help renew the concept of self and keep it alive. Now, more than a century after James, the self is one of Western psychology’s most vigorously researched topics. Every year, new studies galore appear on se1£esteem, self-disclosure, self-awareness, self-schemas, self-monitoring, and so forth. Even neuroscientists have searched for self, by identifying a central frontal lobe region that activates when people respond to self-reflective questions about their traits and dispositions (Damasio, 2010; Mitchell, 2009). Underlying this research is an assumption that the self, as organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, is the center of personality.

One example of thinking about se1£ is the concept of possible selves put forth by Hazel Markus and her colleagues (Cross & Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986).Your possible selves include your visions of the self you dream of becoming the rich self, the successful self, the loved and admired self. They also include the self you fear becoming-the unemployed self, the lonely self, the academically failed self. Such possible selves motivate us by laying out specific goals and calling forth the energy to work toward them. University of Michigan students in a combined undergraduate/medical school program earn higher grades if they undergo the program with a clear vision of themselves as successful doctors. Dreams do often give birth to achievements.

Our self-focused perspective may motivate us, but it can also lead us to presume too readily that others are noticing and evaluating us. Thomas Gilovich (1996) demonstrated this spotlight effect by having individual Cornell University students don Barry Manilow T-shirts before entering a room with other students. Feeling self-conscious (even in the 1990s, singer Barry Manilow was not cool), the T-shirt wearers guessed that nearly half their peers would take note of the shirt as they walked in. In reality, only 23 percent did. This absence of attention applies not only to our dorky clothes and bad hair but also to our nervousness, irritation, or attraction: Fewer people notice than we presume (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999). Others are also less aware than we suppose of the variability – the ups and downs – of our appearance and performance (Gilovich et al., 2002). Even after a blunder (setting off a library alarm, showing up in the wrong clothes), we stick out like a sore thumb less than we imagine (Savitsky et al., 2001). Knowing about the spotlight effect can be empowering. Help public speakers to understand that their natural nervousness is not so apparent to their audience and their speaking performance improves (Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003).

The Benefits of Self-Esteem

How we feel about ourselves is also important. High self-esteem – a feeling of self-worth – pays dividends. So does self-efficacy, our sense of competence on a task. People who feel good about themselves (who strongly agree with self-affirming questionnaire statements such as, “I am fun to be with”) have fewer sleepless nights. They succumb less easily to pressures to conform. They are more persistent at difficult tasks; they are less shy, anxious, and lonely. And they are just plain happier (Greenberg, 2008; Orth et al., 2008, 2009). If feeling bad, they think they deserve better and thus make more effort to repair their mood (Wood et al., 2009).

But is high self-esteem the horse or the cart? Is it really “the armor that protects kids” from life’s problems (McKay, 2000)? Some psychologists have their doubts (Baumeister, 2006; Dawes, 1994; Leary, 1999; Seligman, 1994, 2002). Children’s academic self-efficacy – their confidence that they can do well in a subject – predicts school achievement. But general self-image does not (Marsh & Craven, 2006; Swann et al., 2007; Trautwein et al., 2006). Maybe self-esteem simply reflects reality. Maybe feeling good follows doing well. Maybe it’s a side effect of meeting challenges and surmounting difficulties. Maybe self-esteem is a gauge that reads out the state of our relationships with others. If so, isn’t pushing the gauge artificially higher (“You are special”) akin to forcing a car’s low fuel gauge to display “full”? And if problems and failures cause low self-esteem, won’t the best boost therefore come not from our repeatedly telling children how wonderful they are but from their own effective coping and hard-won achievements?

However, experiments do reveal an effect of low self-esteem. Temporarily deflate people’s self-image (say, by telling them they did poorly on an aptitude test or by disparaging their personality) and they will be more likely to disparage others or to express heightened racial prejudice (Ybarra, 1999). Those who are negative about themselves also tend to be oversensitive and judgmental (Baumgardner et al., 1989; Pelham, 1993). In experiments, people made to feel insecure often become excessively critical, as if to impress others with their own brilliance (Amabile, 1983). Such findings are consistent with Maslow’s and Rogers’ presumptions that a healthy self-image pays dividends. Accept yourself and you’ll find it easier to accept others. Disparage yourself and you will be prone to the floccinaucinihilipilification 1 of others. Said more simply, some “love their neighbors as themselves”; others loathe their neighbors as themselves. People who are down on themselves tend to be down on other things and people.

Self-Serving Bias

FOCUS QUESTION: What evidence reveals self-serving bias, and how do defensive and secure self-esteem differ?

Carl Rogers (1958) once objected to the religious doctrine that humanity’s problems arise from excessive self-love, or pride. He noted that most people he had known “despise themselves, regard themselves as worthless and unlovable.” Mark Twain had a similar idea: “No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.”

Actually, most of us have a good reputation with ourselves. In studies of self-esteem, even those who score relatively low respond in the midrange of possible scores. (A low-self-esteem person responds to statements such as “I have good ideas” with qualifying adjectives such as somewhat or sometimes.) Moreover, one of psychology’s most provocative and firmly established recent conclusions concerns our potent self-serving bias – our readiness to perceive ourselves favorably (Mezulis et al., 2004; Myers, 2008). Consider:

The phenomenon, which reflects the overestimation of self rather than the underestimation of others (Epley & Dunning, 2000), is less striking in Asia, where people value modesty (Falk et al., 2009; Heine & Hamamura, 2007).Yet self-serving biases have been observed worldwide: among Dutch, Australian, and Chinese students; Japanese drivers; Indian Hindus; and French people of most walks of life. In every one of 53 countries surveyed, people expressed self-esteem above the midpoint of the most widely used scale (Schmitt & Allik, 2005).

Ironically, people even see themselves as more immune than others to self-serving bias (Pronin, 2007). The world, it seems, is Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon writ large – a place where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And so are the pets. Three in four owners believe their pet is smarter than average (Nier, 2004).

Threatened egotism, more than low self-esteem, it seems, predisposes aggression. This is true even in childhood, when the recipe for frequent fighting mixes high self-esteem with social rejection. The most aggressive children tend to have high self-regard that gets punctured by other kids’ dislike (van Boxtel et al., 2004).

An adolescent or adult whose swelled head is deflated by insults is potentially dangerous. Finding their self-esteem threatened, people with large egos may react violently. “Aryan pride” fueled Nazi atrocities. “These biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end,” noted Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon (2007) .

Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister (1998; Bushman et al., 2009) experimented with what they call the “dark side of high self-esteem.” They had 540 undergraduate volunteers write a brief essay, in response to which another supposed student gave them either praise (“Great essay!”) or stinging criticism (“One of the worst essays I have readl”). Then the essay writers played a reaction-time game against the other student. After wins, they could assault their opponent with noise of any intensity for any duration.

Can you anticipate the result? After criticism, those with inflated high self-esteem were “exceptionally aggressive.” They delivered three times the auditory torture of those with normal self-esteem. “Encouraging people to feel good about themselves when they haven’t earned it” poses problems, Baumeister (2001) concluded. “Conceited, self-important individuals turn nasty toward those who puncture their bubbles of self-love.”

Are self-serving perceptions on the rise in North America? Some researchers believe they are. From 1980 to 2007, popular song lyrics became more self-focused (DeWall et al., 2011). From 1988 to 2008, self-esteem scores increased among American collegians, high schoolers, and especially middle school students (Gentile et al., 2010). On one prominent self-esteem inventory on which 40 is the highest possible self-esteem score, 51 percent of 2008 collegians scored 35 or more.

Narcissism – excessive self-love and self-absorption – is also rising, reports psychologist Jean Twenge (2006; Twenge & Foster, 2010). After tracking self-importance across the last several decades, Twenge found that what she calls Generation Me (born in the 1980s and 1990s) is expressing more narcissism by agreeing more often with statements such as, “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” or “I think I am a special person.” Agreement with such narcissistic statements correlates with materialism, the desire to be famous, inflated expectations, more hookups with fewer committed relationships, more gambling, and more cheating, all of which have been increasing as narcissism has increased.

Some critics of the concept of self-serving bias claim that it overlooks those who feel worthless and unlovable: If self-serving bias prevails, why do so many people disparage themselves? For four reasons:

Even so, it’s true: All of us some of the time, and some of us much of the time, do feel inferior – especially when we compare ourselves with those who are a step or two higher on the ladder of status, looks, income, or ability. The deeper and more frequently we have such feelings, the more unhappy, even depressed, we are. But for most people, thinking has a naturally positive bias.

While recognizing the dark side of self-serving bias and self-esteem, some researchers prefer isolating the effects of two types of self-esteem – defensive and secure (Kernis, 2003; Lambird & Mann, 2006; Ryan & Deci, 2004). Defensive self-esteem is fragile. It focuses on sustaining itself, which makes failures and criticism feel threatening. Such egotism exposes one to perceived threats, which feed anger and disorder, note Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park (2004).

Secure self-esteem is less fragile, because it is less contingent on external evaluations. To feel accepted for who we are, and not for our looks, wealth, or acclaim, relieves pressures to succeed and enables us to focus beyond ourselves. By losing ourselves in relationships and purposes larger than self, Crocker and Park add, we may achieve a more secure self-esteem and greater quality of life.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: What possible selves do you dream of – or fear – becoming? To what extent do these imagined selves motivate you now?

TEST YOURSELF: In a 1997 Gallup poll, White Americans estimated 44 percent of their fellow White Americans to be high in prejudice (scoring them 5 or higher on a 10-point scale). How many rated themselves similarly high in prejudice? Just 14 percent. What phenomenon does this illustrate?

Culture and the Self

FOCUS QUESTION: How do individualist and collectivist cultures influence people?

Imagine that someone were to rip away your social connections, making you a solitary refugee in a foreign land. How much of your identity would remain intact?

If as our solitary traveler you pride yourself on your individualism, a great deal of your identity would remain intact – the very core of your being, the sense of “me,” the awareness of your personal convictions and values. Individualists (often people from North America, Western Europe, Australia, or New Zealand) give relatively greater priority to personal goals and define their identity mostly in terms of personal attributes (Schimmack et al., 2005). They strive for personal control and individual achievement. In American culture, with its relatively big I and small we, 85 percent of people have agreed that it is possible “to pretty much be who you want to be” (Sampson, 2000).

Individualists share the human need to belong. They join groups. But they are less focused on group harmony and doing their duty to the group (Brewer & Chen, 2007) . And being more self-contained, they more easily move in and out of social groups. They feel relatively free to switch places of worship, switch jobs, or even leave their extended families and migrate to a new place. Marriage is often for as long as they both shall love.

If set adrift in a foreign land as a collectivist, you might experience a greater loss of identity. Cut off from family, groups, and loyal friends, you would lose the connections that have defined who you are. In a collectivist culture, group identifications provide a sense of belonging, a set of values, a network of caring individuals, an assurance of security. In return, collectivists have deeper, more stable attachments to their groups – their family, clan, or company. In South Korea, for example, people place less value on expressing a consistent, unique self-concept, and more on tradition and shared practices (Choi & Choi, 2002).

Valuing communal solidarity means placing a premium on preserving group spirit and ensuring that others never lose face. What people say reflects not only what they feel (their inner attitudes) but what they presume others feel (Kashima et al., 1992). Avoiding direct confrontation, blunt honesty, and uncomfortable topics, collectivists often defer to others’ wishes and display a polite, self-effacing humility (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Elders and superiors receive respect, and duty to family may trump personal career and mate preferences (Zhang & Kline, 2009). In new groups, people may be shy and more easily embarrassed than their individualist counterparts (Singelis et aL 1995, 1999). Compared with Westerners, people in Japanese and Chinese cultures, for example, exhibit greater shyness toward strangers and greater concern for social harmony and loyalty (Bond, 1988; Cheek & Melchior, 1990; Triandis, 1994). When the priority is “we,” not “me,” that individualized latte – “decaf, single shot, skinny, extra hot” – that feels so good to a North American in a coffee shop might sound more like a selfish demand in Seoul (Kim & Markus, 1999).

To be sure, there is diversity within cultures. Even in the most individualist countries, some people manifest collectivist values. Within many countries, there are also distinct cultures related to one’s religion, economic status, and region (Cohen, 2009). And in collectivist Japan, a spirit of individualism marks the “northern frontier” island of Hokkaido (Kitayama et al., 2006). But in general, people (especially men) in competitive, individualist cultures have more personal freedom, are less geographically bound to their families, enjoy more privacy, and take more pride in personal achievements (TABLE 59.3 on the next page).

They even prefer unusual names, as psychologist Jean Twenge noticed while seeking a name for her first child. Over time, the most common American names listed by year on the US. Social Security baby names website were becoming less desirable. When she and her colleagues (2010) analyzed the first names of 325 million American babies born between 1880 and 2007, they confirmed this trend. As FIGURE 59.3 illustrates, the percentage of boys and girls given one of the 10 most common names for their birth year has plunged, especially in recent years. (No wonder my parents, who welcomed my arrival in a less individualist age, gave me such a common first name.)

The individualist-collectivist divide appeared in reactions to medals received during the 2000 and 2002 Olympic games. US. gold medal winners and the US. media covering them attributed the achievements mostly to the athletes themselves (Markus et al., 2006). “1 think I just stayed focused,” explained swimming gold medalist Misty Hyman. “It was time to show the world what I could do. I am just glad I was able to do it.” Japan’s gold medalist in the women’s marathon, Naoko Takahashi, had a different explanation: “Here is the best coach in the world, the best manager in the world, and all of the people who support me-all of these things were getting together and became a gold medal.” Even when describing friends, Westerners tend to use trait-describing adjectives (“she is helpful”), whereas East Asians more often use verbs that describe behaviors in context (“she helps her friends”) (Heine & Buchtel, 2009; Maass et al., 2006).

Individualism’s benefits can come at the cost of more loneliness, higher divorce and homicide rates, and more stress-related disease (Popenoe, 1993; Triandis et aI., 1988). Demands for more romance and personal fulfillment in marriage can subject relationships to more pressure (Dion & Dion, 1993). In one survey, “keeping romance alive” was rated as important to a good marriage by 78 percent of U.S. women but only 29 percent of Japanese women (American Enterprise, 1992). In China, love songs often express enduring commitment and friendship (Rothbaum & Tsang, 1998): “We will be together from now on.... I will never change from now to forever.”

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: Which concept best describes you -collectivist or individualist? Do you fit completely in either category, or are you sometimes a collectivist and sometimes an individualist?

TEST YOURSELF: How do individualist and collectivist cultures differ?