Playing as Adaptation? Layered Selfhood and Self-regard in Cultural Contexts

Abstract

The current paradigm shift from realism and humanism to social constructionism and postmodernism has tremendous implications for social sciences, especially for psychology. The idea that not only our knowledge, but also our self, emotions and cognitions are constructed by society and culture is embraced by some cross-cultural and cultural psychologists and postmodernists. While this stance attempts to integrate culture and psychology, it depreciates the part of the self that can stand apart from culture and society and therefore be shared among humankind. This paper proposes a layered model of selfhood to incorporate both universal and existential human experience and the influence of culture and society. Heine, Lehman, Markus and Kitayama’s (1999) cross-cultural study of self-regard serves as an exemplar of the constructionist approach and their data are reanalyzed using the proposed model of selfhood. The notion of ‘play’ is introduced to understand the dynamics at the interface between cultural regulations and individuals. This paper also explores the cultural norms of East Asia and America.