writing

Rami Markuse

PSY-3

1

7

08/11/2020

The Differences of Self-Concept in East Asia and America

Undoubtedly, the image that we have for ourselves is a concept that is specifically influenced by how we interact with significant people in our lives. Even though this idea of self-concept can be developed in several ways, the question that stands is; how exactly does image of oneself form and transform with time? Human beings tend to have certain beliefs about themselves from the time they were young to adulthood. There are many factors that contribute to how people perceive their behavior, abilities, and traits such as environmental factors, social factors, cultural factors and religious factors. The perceptions people have about themselves is called self-concept; it is a term surrounded by many subtopics such as self-image which often means what people see on themselves, for example through their physical features, and social duties to name a few (Rosenberg, 2017). In its definition, self-concept can be described as the mental picture of oneself, which is the thought that people hold of their abilities, behavior, and unique features. Self-concept incorporates three key aspects which are self-image (how much we see ourselves), self-esteem (how much we value ourselves), and the ideal self (how we all wish we could be). Among all other factors, culture plays a role in how we develop a self-concept. Individuals from various cultures hold different understanding of the self, others and how these two relate. In most cases, such understanding defines the nature of one’s individual experience, involving emotion, cognition, and motivation. In that context, this paper will examine how the idea of self-concept differs between the East Asians and North Americans.

Culture is a term used to describe how different people in the world carry out their daily activities in terms of social activities, religion, language and food to name a few (Pan, Maïano, & Morin, 2018). For people to have a particular known culture, they have to revolve around different sets of beliefs and values that bring them together. In life people develop a set of values and beliefs due to the influence they get from their cultures, family norms, and individual activities. Beliefs are those things people assume about everything in the world whereas values are developed from the beliefs people have about the world. Beliefs originate from religion, people believing that there is a Supernatural Being that is Powerful and mighty, and through such beliefs, people develop a set of values such as submissiveness, obedience, loyalty, and faithfulness to name a few. Beliefs may also originate from social activities such as music where people get educated from different songs or people learn the value of being honest. Beliefs may also originate from different languages of people and food making processes.

There have been a series of environmental changes in the recent years, and the causes are uncountable; the environmental changes have been caused by pollution of air due to vehicle exhaust fumes, or gaseous and solid wastes from industries. Such pollution has contributed to global warming which has affected the world negatively due to extreme heat waves which are associated with skin cancer, floods, storms and drought to name a few. All these environmental changes have affected the world’s population due to the reduction of food supply, increased infections from old and new upcoming diseases, displacement of people, and loss of livelihoods. Environmental changes affect personal values in many ways; people develop coping skills towards preventing certain illnesses making them unable to contract the diseases. people become more self-aware of nutritional and hygiene practices that prevent them from getting certain illnesses. Environmental changes also make people more self-aware of what works well for them in certain areas allowing them to avoid those that do not work well for them.

Social changes are those changes that originate from the different interactions with other people. People may experience social changes when they are moved to new schools, new workstations, or new and different environments where they get to meet other people. Such changes affect people in their personal values because most of the time they always have to change their original selves in order to fit in the new social groups (Mund, Finn, Hagemeyer, & Neyer, 2016). Changing workplaces and schools may result to other people not attaining their previous goals. The lack of achieving goals set may turn out to be positive because it makes people evaluate themselves and new changes are made to the previous goals. The changing of previous goals helps the individual to restructure current goals promoting personal development due to improved decision making and planning processes.

To begin with, in contrast to the notion of interdependent self among the East Asians, Americans concept of independent self is described as comparatively confined and autonomous entity which exists separately from other others and bordering social context (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). As such, the individual self is perceived to be comparable to object in that they are considered as unified, whole, stable, integrated, and inviolate beings (Shweder et al., 1998). Even though, such situations may stimulate various elements of a functioning self-concept, the key representation of oneself remain to be significantly unaffected by the presence of other individuals. As a result, the self remains unchanged and is constant in different situations. On the other hand, the self among the East Asians is largely described as a relational occurrence. This is because, the roles and relationships of an individual take precedency over internalized and abstracted qualities such as traits, attitudes and abilities. Therefore, the self is bound to have different obligations in respect to changing situation. It is vital for an individual from East Asia to have the ability to know the specific role requirements that are needed for a particular situation and also how to accordingly modify itself. In Japan, Kejime, the ability to discern oneself between the required demands across different situation is described to be essential to the maturity of a person (Bachnik, 1992), and is considered a major focus of thought in most schools in Japan.

Secondly, by focusing on the intra-individual and extra-individual, both East Asia and American cultures hold different ideas. East Asians often consider situation information to be of significant utility since it is more likely to have a connection with one’s behavior, and more often they are likely to consider attending to such information. Similarly, even though, dispositions tend to be ways of conceptualizing elements of people entirely, dispositional information should be analytical of one’s behavior in the American culture as compared to Japanese culture (Church, 2000). Undeniably, to the extent that information resides outside or within a person, the more they are likely to devote their attention to a situation, the less they will direct their attention to such dispositions. Studies have described people from the American culture as being reluctant in considering information outside in explaining other’s behaviors. They act in correspondence to the lay theory which indicates that behavior is majorly a product of people’s personalities involved in it. East Asians are likely to attend to people’s dispositions since they are not likely to describe themselves in terms of abstract traits compared to Americans even though they have the ability to think conceptually (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Research has found that the individuals from the western culture are likely to instinctively create trait explanations for people’s behaviors.

More importantly, East Asians tend to stress on the malleability of self where the western culture emphasize on the malleability of the world. According to the Asian culture, the individual self dwells in several roles with respect to the connections that people have with each other, and needs to be flexible enough to adapt to various situational demands and role expectations. Their social world is described as lasting and permanent inspired by forces beyond oneself. Participating in such a culture motivates a person into harmonizing with other people and adjusting to the social environment. On the other hand, the westerners use the anecdote of creation to stress on the malleability of the world since man was given control over the world so they can change it to their benefit. This belief manifests in the view that a person has the ability of shaping the surroundings to suit their desires. In contrast, the self is considerably consistent and immutable highlighting a particular insight of personal agency. To Americans, the self is largely founded on a distinctive set of processes and qualities, and the configuration of inner attributes is viewed to cause behavior.

In conclusion, it is very important for individuals to understand themselves, who they are, who they want to become, what works well for them and what does not. Understanding how environmental and social factors may affect how a person behaves is very vital because environmental and social changes are inevitable. Culture plays a vital role in the way self-concept is idealized. Various cultures have different influences on self-image, self-esteem, and ideal self. As discussed, the East Asian and the American culture holds different perspectives on the image individuals have of themselves. The differences under discussion included flexibility versus consistency, the focus on extra-individual versus intra-individual, and malleability of the world versus of the self.

References

Bachnik, J. (1992). Kejime: Defining a shifting self in multiple organizational modes. In

N. R. Rosenberger (Ed.), Japanese sense of self (pp. 152–172). Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Church, A. T. (2000). Culture and personality: Toward an integrated cultural trait

Psychology. Journal of Personality,
68, 651–703.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition,

Emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review,
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, 224–253.

Shweder, R. A., Goodnow, J., Hatano, G., LeVine, R. A., Markus, H., &Miller, P. (1998).

The cultural psychology of development: One mind, many mentalities. InW. Damon

& R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 865– 937). New

York: John Wiley and Sons.

Pan, C. C., Maïano, C., & Morin, A. J. (2018). Physical self-concept and body dissatisfaction among Special Olympics athletes: A comparison between sex, weight status, and culture. Research in developmental disabilities, 76, 1-11.

Rosenberg, M. (2017). The self-concept: Social product and social force. In Social psychology (pp. 593-624). Routledge.

Mund, M., Finn, C., Hagemeyer, B., & Neyer, F. J. (2016). Understanding dynamic transactions between personality traits and partner relationships. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(6), 411-416.

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Write3-4 paragraphs (600-1000 words) on the major aspects of the entire Reflective Essay and Literature Report. In your essay please include:

1) the overall purpose of the study and the research question or problem(s) you investigated.

2) the basic design of the study (e.g. how much of the study was based on personal observations and analysis and how much was informed by empirical research).

3) major findings or trends found as a result of your process.