Cultural factors are what influences self concepts, in this case individualism and collectivism illustrates this, where for example in Japan the saying “the nail that stands out gets pounded down” and in the United States the saying “squeaky wheel gets the grease”. This shows to an extent that in Japan, children are raised to the expectations of the social group and to be interdependent and to be in social harmony by being cooperative with others; showing a collectivist society norm. Whereas in the states, children are raised as individuals, self- reliant, assertive and independent thinkers with an increase in autonomy; showing an individualist society norm. Personal goals are achieved and considered more in priority over group rules and alliances for an individualist, unlike an collectivist, the person would first and foremost be loyal to its group as a member, such as any social group member for example, a family member, church member etc (Triandis 1994). This leads to the worldwide study of the company IBM, where a study of 116,000 employees was held. It was found that employees from the ‘westernized countries’ such as United States, Australia, Great Britain, Canada and the Netherlands were mostly consisted of ‘fierce’ and individualist people, however employees from asian and south America countries, such as Venezuela, Colombia, Pakistan, Peru, Taiwan and China, mainly consisted of collectivist people. This emphasises that different countries has different cultural views, thus leads to different cultural orientations, whether individualism or collectivism societies.
Individualism and collectivism can deeply motivate and change one’s self concept and views, since it’s so engraved into a culture and thus moulds one’s self conception and identity. This is shown by Markus and Kitayama (1991) research on western cultures and eastern cultures. From the results North Americans and Europeans tends to show an independent view of them self, such as “the only person you can count on is yourself” and “I enjoy being unique and different from others”, in contrast to the Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, showed an interdependent view of them self, for example “I’m partly to blame if one of my family members or co-workers fails” or “my happiness depends on the happiness of those around me”. Generally the westernized cultured people (north Americans and Europeans) held themselves as an entity which are distinct, autonomous, self-contained and invests with their unique self qualities (all to which shows of independent views), whereas the non-westernized cultures showed qualities of interdependent views, by commenting on their belonging to a large social group network that one is socially connected, e.g family, co-workers etc.
Self perception is also motivated by these cultural orientations, seen through the research of Trafimow et al (1991), where North Americans and Chinese students filled out sentences starting with “I am...”. Americans tended to fill out blanks with self traits descriptions, for example “I am shy”. Whereas Chinese students would tend to fill out “I am a college student”, where they tended to fill out group affiliations to identify themselves in a group. This leads to the Chinese tradition where family names tended to be before their first names, to show a family (social group) belonging. Similar study has been done on Australians and Malaysians (Bochner 1994). This emphasises again on the independent and interdependent views as in the previous research.
Another found theory (Kitayama and Markus 1991) is where American college students saw themselves less similar to the Asian students, where they perceive themselves as being unique and different, thus being independent concepted of self belief. They tend to expressed jealousy, pride and other sorts of ‘ego-focus’ emotions leading to their self autonomous entity. They try to strive their personal achievements, where they overestimate their own contributions to team effort, credit for success and blame other for failure. Asian and other non-westerners tend to express ‘other focused’ emotions that mainly remains and brings towards social harmony. For example in Japan, feelings of oime (loyal to someone), fureai (connection to someone) and shitashimi (familiarity to someone). This emphasises that in collectivist societies, people derives from the satisfaction of their group value, as well as underestimating their own role and presenting themselves in a more modest, self effacing terms.
Heine and Lehman (1995) researched on Canadian and Japanese students to estimate themselves and their peers through positive and negative types of events. Results shown from Canadian students saw themselves and their peers to likely undergo through positive events than negative, however Japanese students rated themselves and friends in experiencing both positive and negative events equally. This shows that perhaps in westernized culture only thinks of their personal goals and what they want to attain in positively in life, unlike non-westernized culture thinks as a ‘group’ and what conditions is threatened to them as a whole.
Another interesting point is language. Language can influence cultural behaviour, especially in a culturally diverse country and thus lead off to whether societies are individualists or collectivists. A research based on Hong Kong students (Trafimow et al 1997), where English was spoken as a second language, were given questions of “Who am I?” on half of the students were given it in Chinese (local language) and the other half in English (second language). The majority results shown that when asked in English, responses focused on personal traits increased, whereas asked in Chinese, responses focused on group affiliations traits. Thus emphasising that each of us has a potential of having both collectivist and individualist aspects (based on the usage and influence by language), as well as the situations we are in.
In conclusion cultural influences on self conceptions can be attained in a number of ways, from one’s cultural views to emotional perceptions to language, effecting on one’s behaviour easily as well as their own cultural perception leading to their perception on own social groups. This can be seen through personal traits and group traits, affecting their beliefs and views.
