Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Other People and Social Situations Shape Us?
Trace the movement between daily practices, institutions, and ways of understanding the self.
Why you’re reading it. Extend the opening account of situations to the social worlds that make some situations common and meaningful.
A question to consider. How could a group's routine for welcoming newcomers both reflect and reinforce an idea about who belongs?
Why this reading
Markus and Kitayama explain how selves and social worlds can help constitute one another. Their framework connects everyday practices to institutions and shared ideas, making culture part of a psychological explanation rather than a label attached to a sample.
Before you read
Mutual constitution means that people develop within cultural practices and also reproduce or change those practices. Independence and interdependence describe ways of organizing agency and relationships, not two exhaustive kinds of person.
Read for
- Trace the connections among ideas, institutions, daily practices, and selves in Figure 1.
- Distinguish a proposed process from a difference observed between national samples.
- Examine the authors' discussion of within-culture variation and the limitations of treating country as culture.
Consider afterwards
- A classroom rewards individual competition while students also depend on one another's explanations. How could its practices encourage more than one way of understanding the self?
Editorial context
The article develops an influential framework using a selective literature available in 2010. Its broad comparisons should not turn into stereotypes about every person from a region. The authors discuss measurement and sampling problems, including a heavy emphasis on middle-class North American comparison groups. A reciprocal diagram organizes hypotheses; it does not by itself identify a causal pathway.