cousins, s. d. (1989). culture and self-perception in japan and the united states.pdf

7/29/2019 Cousins, S. D. (1989). Culture and Self-Perception in Japan and the United States.pdf

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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1989, Vol.56, No. 1,124-131 Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0022-35l4/89/$00.75

Culture and Self-Perception in Japan and the United StatesSteven D. CousinsUniversity of Michigan

I examined the influence of cultural meaning systems on the perception of self among Japanese andAmerican (United States) college students. Given the importance of social context to the Japaneseself as compared with the U.S. self, I used two types of free-response format: the noncontextualizedTwenty Statements Test (TST), and a contextualized questionnaire asking subjects to describe them-selves in various situations. Consistent with prior research, on the TST Japanese subjects listedfewer abstract, psychological attributes than did American subjects, referring more to social role andbehavioral context. On the contextualized format, however, this trend was reversed. Japanese scoredhigher on abstract, psychological attributes than did Americans, who tended to qualify their self-descriptions. In addition, on the TST Japanese surpassed Americans in the number of highly ab-stract, global self-references. Results point to the impact of divergent cultural conceptions of theperson rather than differences in cognitive abilityon the perception of self in these twocultures.

Person perception in preliterate, non-Western cultures hasbeen described as "concrete" in its focus on situation-boundbehavior and social role, rather than on abstract personalitytraits or dispositions (Hallpike, 1979; Luria, 1974/1976; Wer-ner & Kaplan, 1956). Such concreteness isusually ascribed to acognitive inability to summarize consistencies of behavior overvarious contexts in the form of dispositions, or to a premodernsocial environment in which such abstract thinking about peo-ple is not needed. Cognitive or experiential deficits are thus seento keep certain non-Western cultures from perceiving the per-son as independent from the concrete contexts of daily life.This study looked at one type of person perceptionthe per-ception of selfin Japan and the United States. Japan is uniqueamong non-Western cultures in its status as a fully industrial-ized, modern nation. Yet many observers have noted the persis-tence of concrete modes of thought (Ishida, 1974; H. Naka-mura, 1964) corresponding to a Japanese self "subordinate" tosocial role and behavioral context (DeVos, 1973; Miyoshi,1974; Nakane, 1970). In a recent study, moreover, Bond andTak-sing (1983) found Japanese self-descriptions to be "moreconcrete" (p. 162) than those of Americans. The question oc-curs: If Japan is thoroughly modern, what is the source of suchconcreteness in the perception of self?

Interpretation of Abstract-Concrete Dichotomyin Cross-Cultural Research

Typically, in cross-cultural research the term concrete refersto a boundedness to perceptual stimuli, a tendency to perceive

I wish to thank Reiko Koide, Kazuhiko Hata, Mieko Kashiwabara,Kunih iko Fukamaki, and Masato Mitsutake for their assistance in col-lecting data, and Richard Nisbett and Harold Stevenson for helpfulcomments on an earlier draft of this article. I am grateful to Hazel Mar-kus for her thoughtful advice on all stages of this project, and to TokoCousins for her support and insight into Japanese ways of thinking.Correspondenceconcerning this article should be addressed toStevenD. Cousins, t)aikoku Machi 4-3, Nagasaki-shi 850, Japan.

things as part of the real-life settings from which they normallytake their meaning (e.g., "the flower that grows on the hill"and"the flower that grows in the valley"), rather than to mentallyisolate objects or their attributes (e.g., stems or petals of aflower) and generalize across contexts on the basis of conceptualsimilarity (e.g., "they are both flowers"). In the case of personperception, concrete thinking implies a perceptual bounded-ness to the behavior of everyday contexts (e.g., "He loans usmoney when we run out"; "He gives us presents when he visitsus") and a tendency not to abstract features of behavior fromsuch contexts, as observed over time (e.g., "He is generous").Cognitive and Experiential Interpretations

Explanations of concrete modes of thought in non-Westerncultures have focused on the cognitive capacity to differentiateattributes from context, a capacity held to evolve over ontogenyaccording to universal lawsof cognitive growth (Hallpike, 1979;Inhelder & Piaget, 1964; Werner, 1948). The theoretical basisfor much cross-cultural .research in cognitionthe work of de-velopmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1954, 1967) assumes aprogression from an initial stage of concrete, stimulus-boundperception to later, more mature thought capable of abstractingveridical categories from beneath surface content. Many cross-cultural studies based on these premises have assigned preliter-ate peoples to early, concrete stages in the Piagetian scheme (seeDasen, 1972, for a review). More recently, Piaget's ideas havebeen applied to the development of self-perception along a con-crete-abstract spectrum (Harter, 1983) and to the evaluation ofself-awareness in non-Western cultures (Hallpike, 1979; Lives-ley & Bromley, 1973).

Other theorists, although sharing the basic assumption of astagelike progression from concrete to abstract thought, havestressed the influence of modernization, including educationand urbanization, on abstract thinking (Goody, 1977; Green-field, 1972; Horton, 1967). In more economically and institu-tionally complex societies, it is held, the ability to generalize bymeans of abstract categories is highly adaptive and thus fos-tered.

124


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CULTURE AND SELF-PERCEPTION 125Over the past two decades, however, research in cognitive de-

velopment has cast doubt on these notions (see Gelman & Bail-largeon, 1983, for a review). Evidence now suggests, for exam-ple, that a person's thinking does not reside in a given stage,and that abstract processes vary widely with the task (Gelman,1978). Children as young as 3 years of age have demonstratedsome capacity for abstract classification (e.g., Rosch, Mervis,Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). Moreover, the effects ofschooling and urbanization on abstract thinking have proven tobe localized rather than global, limited to those skills especiallyuseful in modern settings (Cole, Sharp, & Lave, 1976; Scribner& Cole, 1981).Cultural Interpretation

Several recent studies, although confirming the presence ofconcrete thinking in non-Western cultures, nonetheless departfrom cognitive or experiential explanations, pointing instead tothe influence of culture on social perception (Miller, 1984;Shweder & Bourne, 1984). These studies rely on symbolic an-thropology's definition of culture as an intersubjectively sharedyet often implicit matrix of meanings structuring the percep-tion of self and world (Geertz, 1973,1975; Schneider, 1976). Bythis view, cultural diversityin abstract thinking follows not onlyfrom differences in cognitive skill or environmental complexity,but also from the predisposing and constitutive effects of diver-gent cultural premises. Such premises have no necessary empir-ical basis, but are historically transmitted products of the col-lective imagination (Sahlins, 1976; Shweder & Bourne, 1984).Accordingly, social phenomena such as "self" or "person"mayhave more than one possible conceptual representation, de-pending on the cultural meanings brought to bear in their inter-pretation.

Shweder and Bourne (1984)$sked subjects in India and theUnited States to describe close acquaintances, and found Indi-ans' descriptions to be more concrete and cpntextually qualifiedthan those of Americans. In the same vein, Miller (1984) com-pared attributions of Americans with those of Indian Hindus,and showed that adult Americans refer more to personal dispo-sitions than do their Hindu counterparts, who tend to attributebehavior to the situation. On the basis of separate tests of sub-jects' abstract thinking, including sorting and labeling tests inwhich Indians fared as well as did Americans, the authors ofboth studies ruled out cognitive deficits, citing instead the im-pact of indigenous cultural meaningsand concepts of the per-son in particularon how people are perceived in these twocultures. They distinguished between individualistic (Ameri-can) and sociocentric (Indian) concepts of the person. Whereasthe individualistic view stresses autonomy, self-aggrandize-ment, and the sense of personal inviolability apart from society,the sociocentric view holds the person to be fundamentally re-lated to others, stressing empathy and the readiness to adjustone's behavior to the situation or group. Sociocentric culturalpremises rather than a lack of abstract skills are seen to causeIndian subjects to focus on interpersonal context and actual be-havior.

Aim of Present StudyAlthough ethnography has provided many detailed accounts

of how self is perceived in non-Western cultures (e.g., Fogelson,

1982; Heelas & Lock, 1981; G. M. White & Kirkpatrick, 1985),systematic, empirical studies are rare. In one of the few suchstudies available, Luria (1976) asked central Asian peasants todescribe positive traits as well as shortcomings in themselves,and found that subjects referred instead to everyday settingsand events. Luria's interpretation of his data is consistent withthe emphasis on cognitive deficits:

the task of analyzing one's ow n psychological features or subjectivequalities went beyond the capabilities of a considerable proportionof our subjects.. . . Typically, they replaced a characterization ofintrinsic qualities by a description of concrete forms of externalbehavior. (1976, p. 147)In contrast to the preliterate peasant villages of Luria's (1976)

study, Japan is a modern society comparable to the UnitedStates in industrial and scientific achievement, with a literacyrate of over 99%. One might predict, then, the presence of ab-stract thinking typical of Western cultures. Oddly enough, Jap-anese modes of thought are often described as primarily con-crete (e.g., Ishida, 1974; Yukawa, 1967). H. Nakamura (1964),for example, has claimed that the Japanese focus on the "imme-diate, concrete details of life" and "habitually [avoid] sum-mations of separate facts into broad statements about wholecategories of things" (p. 192). This claim finds support, more-over, in a recent study of self-perception among college studentsin Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States, using the TST(Bond & Tak-sing, 1983). According to the authors, the highnumber of Japanese responses in the categories of choice, aspi-ration, and personal fact, together with a lowfrequency of psy-chological attributes, suggests "a tendency not to describe theself by abstracting features of one's behavior across situations"(p. 163).

In making sense of such concrete trends, one might arguethat Japan's emergence as a modern state is still recent and thatculture-wide changes in certain abstract skills have not yetcaught up. Yet this is difficult to reconcile with, among otherthings, Japanese students' far surpassing their American coun-terparts in the abstract fields of science and math, not just inpure knowledge but in application (e.g., Stevenson, Lee, &Stigler, 1986). The small use of psychological attributes on theTST also cannot be ascribed to linguistic deficits (cf. Jesperson,1934), given the Japanese language's extensive vocabulary ofemotions and personality traits (e.g., Hamano, 1987; A. Naka-mura, 1979). In view of the paradox of such concrete thinkingin Japan, this study looked at the possible role of culture as analternative variable in the perception of self.

What cultural meanings might be relevant to the study ofself in Japan and the United States? The previously mentionedindividualistic and sociocentric views of the person offer a start-ing point.1 Individualistic premisesportraying the person as

1 Although the individualism-sociocentrism dichotomy is often usedto distinguish Western from non-Western concepts of the person, itshould be pointed out that there are many variations (historical as wellas cultural) of both individualism (e.g., Gaines, 1984) and sociocen-trism (e.g., Geertz, 1975; G. M. White & Kirkpatrick, 1985). Thus,Indian sociocentrism is not the same thing as Japanese sociocentrism,although discussion of this distinction is beyond the scope of this article(see, for example, H. Nakam ura, 1964).


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126 STEVEN D. COUSINSa situation-free, discrete agentinduce a search for transcon-textual regularities of behavior. Sociocentric premiseslocat-ing selfhood in human relatedness and mutualitydirectatten-tion to concrete, social contexts, where such mutuality is expe-rienced. A sociocentricethos might thus lead to concrete trendsin self-perception where cognitive or experiential deficits do notexist. Indeed, many anthropologists working within the sym-bolic tradition have described a sociocentric idiom of person-hood in Japan (Edwards, 1987; Lebra, 1976; Plath, 1980;Smith, 1983).

Lebra (1976) denned the ethos of Japanese culture as "socialrelativism": an all-encompassing concern among the Japanesewith human relationships and social interaction. This is notmerely the "other-directedness"(Riesman, 1950) of a Westernego; as Kimura (1972) pointed out, selfness in Japan is not aunitary abstraction to be found within the person, but a socialentity whose meaning is intimately linked to relationships withothers and to the situation one is in. This is well reflected in theJapanese word for se\f,jibun (g#), originally meaning "one'sshare" (Kimura, 1972, p. 154), or by implication, the share ofa given context that is oneself. Hamaguchi (1985) described theJapanese as "relational actors" or "contextuals" for whom theprimary referent in social experiencewhat gets objectified asthe basis for social behavioris not the sovereign ego, butrather the person-in-human-nexus.

Given the importance of social context to the Japanese self,then, the presence or absence of situational cues on a free-re-sponse format should influence how that self is expressed. Byrequesting subjects to respond 20 times to the single question"Who am I?" the TST isolates self from social nexus, and maydiscourage descriptions of personality among Japanese. As Ha-maguchi (1985) has suggested, trait terms used by Japanesetend to characterize an actor system, including the context, asdistinct from a separate, bounded ego. Perhaps, then, it ismainly in context that the rich Japanese lexicon of personalitytakes on meaning.

Accordingly, in this study I used a contextualized free-re-sponse questionnaire in addition to the TST. I predicted thatthe contextualized format, asking subjects to describe them-selves in specific settings such as home or school, would allowJapanese to refer more to personal styles and dispositions. Afinding of such responsescomprising abstract summaries ofbehavior across one's experience in a given contextwouldsupport the idea that Japanese do think abstractly about theself, given a frame of reference conducive to a sociocentricidiom.

MethodSubjects

The sample consisted of 159 Japanese college students from KeioUniversity in Tokyo (42 m en and 54 women) and H yogo E ducationalUniversity in Kobe (63 women), and 1 1 1 American college studentsfrom the U niversity of M ichigan (50 m en and 61 women).Although it is difficult to ensure complete comparability among sam-ples, the educational level and socioeconomic position of the schoolsstudied are roughly equivalent. Keio is one of the two most prestigiousprivate universities in Japan, and Hyogo is known as an outstandingpublic university. Both schools have students of varying socioeconomic

backgrounds and are part of large, urban settings. The University ofMichigan is a highly ranked state university, similar to Keio and Hyogoin the socioeconomic diversity of its students, although less selectivethan Keio in its admissions standards.Instruments

Instructions to the TST were w ritten at the top of the answer sheet asfollows:In the tw enty blanks below please make twenty different statementsin response to the simple question (addressed to yourself), "Whoam I?" Answ er as if you are giving the answers to yourself, not tosomebody else. W rite your answers in the order they occur to you.Don't worry about logic or importance. Go along fairly fast.

These instructions were followed by 20 blank lines beginning with thewords "I am". The contextualized free-response questionnaire con-sisted of the request, "Describe yourself in the following situations:"followed by the phrases "at home," "at school," and "with closefriends." Both questionnaires were translated into Japanese, andchecked by bac k-translation in to English for use with the Japanese sam-ple. Questionnaires were administered in class du ring a regular session,with subjects in both countries averaging 20 min to fill them out. TheTST was presented first, followed by the contextualized questionnaire.Although some have assumed that the order of responses on the TSTimplies salience of those responses in the subject's self-concept (Gor-don, 1968), others have questioned th is assum ption (Brow n & Ferguson,1968). To address t his problem, subjects w ere asked to choose the fiveresponses most important to their concept of themselves. On the top ofthe second page were written the instructions:

Now, go back to the first page and place a check mark next to thefive responses that are most important to you r overall evaluation ofyourself. By important we mean that you would be very upset ifyou were suddenly to discover that you were different from this.

Coding SchemeThe present study made use of a TST coding scheme developed byMcPartland, Gumming, and Garretson (1961), and later revised byHartley (1970). Although not originally intended for such a purpose,this coding scheme offers a highly suitable m ethod f or the cross-culturalcomparison of self-percepts along the concrete-abstract spectrum.Known as the A-B-C-D fourfold method, it consists of four basic cate-gories of self-percepts, each representing a different level of abstractionfrom the physical, phenomenal realm (Hartley, 1970):

A. Physical. References to observable, physical attributes of self,which do not imply social interaction, such as the information onefinds on a driver's license (e.g.,"18 years old," "5'7" tall").B. Social. References to social role, institutional membership,or other socially defined status (e.g., "a college student," "a balle-rina").C. Attributive. Referencesto self as a situation-free agent char-acterized by personal styles of acting, feeling, and thinkin g (e.g.,"friendly," "moody," "ambitious").D. Global. Self-references that are so comprehensive or vagueas to transcend social role and social interaction, and which there-fore do not convey individual characteristics of the respondent(e.g., "a hum an being," "an organic form ").

After the data were collected, early analysis led to an elaboration ofthe attributive (C) and global (D ) categories into five and two subdivi-sions, respectively (see Table 1). For the most part, these subdivisionscorrespond with broad category descriptions offered by H artley (1970),


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CULTURE AND SELF-PERCEPTION 127although not systematized by her in this fashion, and also draw on dis-tinctions found in Gordon's (1968) coding scheme.As shown in Table 1 , attributive(C) responses include the subcategor-ies of preference (C 1; e.g., "one who likes chocolate ice cream"), w ishes(C2; e.g., "one who hopes to become a doctor"), and activities (C3; e.g.,"one who reads science fiction books"). In addition, a distinction wasmade between "qualified" psychological attributes (C4) and "pure"psychological attributes (C5), inspired by a similar distinction in thecoding scheme of Shweder and B ourne (1984). In brief, any psychologi-cal attribute was regarded as qualified if it included reference to otherpeople (e.g., "I am silly w ith close friends"), to tim e (e.g., "I am grouchyin the morning"), or to locale (e.g., "I am talkative in class"). Pure attri-bute responses (C5) are, by contrast, free from such contextual qualifi-cations: "I am honest."No attempt was made to stratify all five attributiv e (C) subdivisionsas to levels of abstraction, but it was assumed that pure attributes (C5)were the most abstract, followed by qualified attributes (C4).Although both global (D) subdivisions designate references to self asabstracted from social role and social engagement, the existential ( D l )category consists of highly private statements of self as uniqu e and indi-viduated (e.g., "myself," "a uniqu e creation"), whereas universal (D2)statements suggest membership in a universal, undifferentiated cate-gory (e.g., "a mammal," "a product of my environment").Numerous composite codings were developed to accommodatemeaning units combining more than one category, and responses notreadily fitting into the fourfold scheme were designated as "other."These latter responses included statements about the immediate situa-tion (e.g., "I am hungry"), judgments about self imputed to others (e.g.,"I am considered good at sports"), "nonsense" statements in which thequestion "Who am I?" seemed to be evaded or rejected (e.g., "a pen-guin"), modified physical (A) statements (e.g., "too short"), and modi-fied social (B) statements (e.g., "a mediocre student").With a few mino r changes, the coding scheme of Table 1 was appliedto the contextualized form at, permitting comparisons between the twoinstrum ents. Certain types of responses (e.g., physical A, unive rsal D2)did not appear on the contextualized format, whereas one additionalcategory, object (O ), was added for descriptions of other persons or ob-jects in which there is no reference to self (e.g., "My piano is outofkey").The unit of analysis for both questionnaires was the independentclause consisting of no more than one verb-object, verb-predicatenominative, or verb-predicate adjective sequence, for example, "I am

Table 1Outline of Coding Scheme

A. PhysicalB. SocialC. Attributive1. Preferences, interests2. W ishes, aspirations3. Activities, habits4. Qu alified psychological attributes5. Pure psychological attributesD. Global1. Existential-individuating2. Universal-oceanicO. Object (for contextualized-format coding only)OtherModified physical (A)Modified social (B)Judgments imputed to othersNonsense responsesImm ediate situation

Table 2Proportion of Category Use by Culture or Twenty StatementsTest (TST) and Contextualized Format

TST (top five)

Type of statement(A) Physical(B) Social(Cl) Preference(C2) Wish(C3) Activity(C4) Qualified attribute(C5) Pure attribute(D l) Existential(D2) Universal(0) Object

UnitedStates.024.093.035.016.013.091.578***.041.007

Japan.048*.274***.072**.049**.084***.086.186.046.050***

ContextualizedUnitedStates

.028.067***.051**.137.353***.257.006.074***

Japan.046.012.026.156.221.412***.021

.010'p


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128 STEVEN D. COUSINSAmerican subjects referred more frequently to pure psycho-

logical attributes (C5; e.g., "I am easygoing") than did Japanesesubjects, (256) = 11.34, p < .001, who referred more to thephysical self (A; e.g., "I am 167 cm tall"), t(256) = 2.18, p


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CULTURE AND SELF-PERCEPTION 129the perception of self is influenced by culture-specific idioms ofpersonhood. Howmight individualistic and sociocentric prem-ises explain the cultural reversal in abstract-concrete trends be-tween these two questionnaires?

Cultural interpretation of TST data. Lacking contextualcues, the TST formatas interpreted from an individualisticperspectiveconnotes situation-freedom, and lends itself to theexpression of ego-autonomy. The pure psychological attributesof American respondents on the TST ("I am curious," "I amsincere") convey coherence and continuity of self apart fromsocial role and appearance. They are emblems of the inner coreof "character," which is the primary referent in social experi-ence.

From a sociocentric perspective, however, the question "Whoam I?" standing alone, represents an unnatural sundering ofperson from social matrix and must therefore be supplementedwith context. Japanese subjects on the TST thus tend to groundthemselves in social affiliations (B; e.g., "a Keio student") orrefer to relatively concrete attributes such as preferences (C1;e.g., "one who likes classical music") and activities (C3; e.g.,"one who plays Mah-Jongg on Friday nights"). In contrast tothe all-or-nothing effects of cognitive deficits, however, a socio-centric cultural idiom does not limit self-perception to con-crete, observable details, because the human relatedness im-plicit to sociocentrism may be abstract as well:"I am a personof the twentieth century"; "I am humankind." This confirmsan observation by Lebra (1976) that the reference group forJapanese belonging may be abstract or "symbolic" (p. 23), aswith the sense of belonging to a historical period.

Such universal (D2) statements on the TST, moreover, suggesta hiatus in Japanese self-percepts along the A-B-C-D con-crete-abstract spectrum, as compared with the U.S. data (seeTable 2). That is, Japanese responses on the TST are both sig-nificantly more abstract (universal D2), and significantly moreconcrete (e.g., social B, activity C3), than those of Americansubjects. If abstractness in person perception were simply amatter of the linear unfolding of cognitive skills over ontog-enyskills common to Japanese and Americans alikeonewould not expect to find such bipolarity in levels of abstractionin one culture as compared with another. A cultural rationalefor these TST data is more compelling: Abstractions of a highorder (e.g., "a human being") as well as of a low order (e.g., "acollege student") express the Japanese self's identity and con-nectedness with the social world, whereas midlevel abstractionsin the form of psychological attributes (e.g., "I am confident")serve to distinguish self as a situation-free actor, and are by com-parison avoided. Abstract thinking in the perception of self,then, can be seen as coherent with and guided by cultural prem-ises, facilitatinga process in which self and other are culturallyconstituted rather than objectively discerned.

Cultural interpretation of contextualized format. Just as thecontext-free TST lends itself to the expression of individualism,so the contextualized format is conducive to a sociocentric, re-lational idiom of the person. Situational cues make it unneces-sary for Japanese subjects to fill in the context integral to theirsense of self, providing the leeway for more abstract self-reflec-tion. It is hereengaged in the familiar settings of daily lifethat Japanese are more likely to experience themselves as dis-tinct agents with personal styles and dispositions: "studious,"

"cheerful," "quiet," "whimsical," "boastful." Such psychologi-cal attributes differ from those of American subjects on theTST, however, in that the attendant processes of abstractioncover the breadth of experience in a given context only. For aself whose primary locus is the interpersonal nexus rather thanthe independent ego, abstracting behavior across contexts ismuch less important than abstracting behavior within a givensetting.

By contrast, American subjects responded to contextual cueswith a more concrete interpretation of self. How might individ-ualistic premises lead to this? Whereas the TST encourages theuse of trait terms connoting the noncontingent, singular "I,"contextual stipulations such as "at school" or "at home" areinconsistent with, and tend to undo, this connotation of situa-tion-freedom. For American subjects, then, trait terms losesome of their meaning on the contextualized format. One resultis that American subjects turn to more readily accessible infor-mation about the self, such as preferences (Cl) or activities(C3), or refer to other people or things apart from self (O). Whenpsychological attributes are mentioned, they tend to be taggedwith some form of contextual qualification, as if to show thatthe "I" is greater than and not to be confused with dispositionsin a given setting. Given the task of defining oneself "at home,"for instance, the individualistic self maysay,"I am usually openwith my brother" the unstated message being "But this is notnecessarily the way I am elsewhere" By highlighting the situa-tion-boundedness of the trait description, then, qualificationspreserve the situation-freedom normally implicit in such terms.The Western ideal of a self unfettered by social ties is aptly de-scribed by Plath (1980):

We enter society out of concession to animal weakness and practi-cal need. Bu t social participation can only dim inish us; our highestself is realized in peak experiences that take us out of the ruck ofsociety. Our cultural nightmare is that the individual throb ofgrowth will be sucked dry in slavish social conformity. All life long,our central struggle is to defend the individual from the collective,(p. 216)American subjects' trend toward greater concreteness on thecontextualized format reflects the difficulty of expressing a con-text-free self where context is already assumed.Interactionism as a Western Model of Behavior asDistinct From a Non-Western Cultural Ethos

Might not all the references to context by American subjectson the contextualized formatto other people, to time, to spe-cific locationsbe proof of some sort of sociocentrism? Is notthe American self too an interactional self-in-society? Indeed,research strongly supports the interaction of person and situa-tion in the behavior of Western subjects (Bowers, 1973; Endler& Magnusson, 1976). Interactionism as a theoretical model,however, must be distinguished from sociocentrism as a culturalethos. Broadly defined, interactionismwith its emphasis onthe social genesis of self and the constructive role of percep-tionmay accommodate either individualistic or sociocentriccultural premises. This in turn implies that the very units ofinteractionperson and situationare constituted in differentways by different cultures.

For this reason, it is not enough to define the Japanese self as


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130 STEVEN D. COUSINSinteractionist in the Meadian (1934) sense, as some observersof Japan have recently done (e.g., Smith, 1985). The issue isnot interaction per se, but rather the divergent cultu ral content,including concepts of the person, that motivate and give mean -ing to this interaction. When a Japanese college student de-scribes herself as being shy at school, her referent is not an iso-lated ego but a self-in-human-nexus vivified in characteristicways in the school setting; when her Am erican c ounterpart saysthat at school she is "sometimes shy with m y teachers," she isobjectifying herself as an independent actor for whom school isbackground. In both cases there is interaction, but the natureof the interaction is cu ltura lly contingent. Perhaps not surpris-ingly, cross-cultural studies of variance in social behavior havefound that, in Japan, the situation accounts for more variancethan does the person (e.g., Argyle, Shimoda, & Little, 1978).The setting of school, for instance, is seen to exert more influ-ence on behavior among Japanese than does an enduring traitof shyness. Yet such a finding assumes a split between situationand selfbetween school and shyness that is not a part ofJapanese c ulture.Individuality Versus Individualism

Some observers of non-Western cultures, including Japan,have linked concrete, situation-bound modes of perception toweak ego boundaries and an undifferentiated, submerged self.Context-dependence, in this view, is a matter of cognitive de-fault: Deficits in abstract think ing lim it self-awareness to aware-ness of social role and concrete behavior. Knowledge of one'sindividualityequated with context-independence by m eansof cross-situational traits and dispositions is held accessible onlyto people of m ore advanced cognitive skills (e.g., Harter, 1983).Such a cognitive approach, however, confu ses indiv idualitywith individualism. Individualism represents one possible con-cept of personhood particular to certain post-EnlightenmentWestern societies (cf. Hogan & E mler, 1978; Sampson, 1977).It is not a prerequisite of individuality, which, as Hallowell(1955) and others have shown, is a hum an universal. Clearly, theJapanese emphasis on roles and situations, as evidenced in thisstudy, does suggest an absence of individualism by U.S. stan-dards. This is due, however, not to a shortage of abstract skills,but to the constitutive effects of an alternative concept of theperson, one privileging the immediacy of experience over itsunitary, abstract features.In this light, one finds expressions of individuality amongJapanese that m ight otherwise be overlooked. On the contextu-alized format, for instance, Japanese subjects make use of anarray of attributive terms suggestive of individuality, but thisis an individuality expressed within, rather than beyond, theprovinces of social context. Compared with Am erican subjects,Japanese are not led by the premises of individ ualism to extendthe abstract processes giving rise to this individuality acrossdifferent contexts, in order to build the internal province of aninviolate ego. This is not to say that Japanese lack context-freeawareness of an inner self. The existential-individuating ( D l )responses on the TST (e.g., "me," "myself"), as well as universalidentifications (D2; e.g., "human being"), amply reflect suchawareness. Rather, Japanese are less concerned with assertingthemselves, through abstract sum ma ries of behavior, as autono-

mou s agents whose actions and feelings exist apart from every-day social settings and engagement with others. Abstract pro-cesses in the perception of self occu r in both cultures, but servedifferent ends: different, though equally valid, experiences ofbeing a person.References

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Received June 23,1987Revision received January 19,1988

Accepted June 3, 1988

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