Respective Cultural Contexts Research Articles

Individual and collective processes in the construction of the self: Self-enhancement in the United States and self-criticism in Japan.

A collective constructionist theory of the self proposes that many psychological processes, including enhancement of the self (pervasive in the United States) and criticism and subsequent improvement of the self (widespread in Japan), result from and support the very ways in which social acts and situations are collectively defined and subjectively experienced in the respective cultural contexts. In support of the theory, 2 studies showed, first, that American situations are relatively conducive to self-enhancement and American people are relatively likely to engage in self-enhancement and, second, that Japanese situations are relatively conducive to self-criticism and Japanese people are relatively likely to engage in self-criticism. Implications are discussed for the collective construction of psychological processes implicated in the self and, more generally, for the mutual constitution of culture and the self.

Product Information Strategies of American and Japanese Television Advertisements

This study examines differences in informational strategies by product categories in Japanese and American television advertisements. Overall findings suggest that American advertisements are perhaps more informative than Japanese advertisements, based on the western standard. However, only by examining the qualitative and quantitative nature of the advertisement—within respective idiosyncratic cultural contexts ‐ could valid results be derived. Hence what is informative to one culture may not be necessarily deemed as relevant to another culture.

Can a Hindu Utopia be a Moslem Utopia? Examples from 12th Century India and Beyond

The present paper compares two utopian social movements that occurred in medieval India under Moslem rule: the Hindu Kānphatā Panth sect and the Moslem Qalandar sect. While similar in outward behavior, they differ in terms of their conceptual, operational, and historical impact on their respective cultures. It is argued that this difference can be explained by the ways in which each movement addresses the central problems of their respective cultural contexts, the acceptability of their respective cultural contexts, the acceptability of their alternative solutions to established ones, and the historical circumstances in which they developed.

THE LATENCY-STAGE STORY PREFERENCES OF AMERICAN AND FINNISH CHILDREN

The writers have previously described their interest in the responses children make to their favorite story and plans for a series of studies to focus on two central questions: What stories do children like? and Why do they seem to like them? Data about favorite stories for the whole of childhood, as judged retrospectively by American college students, have been reported (4, 5, 6). The present paper, the fourth in this series, concerns the story preferences of grade-school children in two countries: an American group composed of children enrolled in the fourth and fifth grades of a New Jersey school and a Finnish group of elementary school children in Helsinki. Initially, it was expected that the story preferences of the subjects, presumably in the latency stage, would reflect differences in their respective cultural contexts.