Join us on Thursday, February 18, 2021 18:00-19:00 (GMT+9) for the presentation “‘Outside the ‘Cultural Binary’: Understanding Why Latin American Collectivist Societies Foster Independent Selves”
Authors: Kuba Krys1, Vivian Vignoles2, Yukiko Uchida3, and Igor de Almeida4.
1 Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
2 School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
3 Kokoro Research Center, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
4 Institute of Liberal Arts, Otemon Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan
Abstract: Cultural psychologists often treat binary contrasts of West versus East, individualism versus collectivism, and independent versus interdependent self-construal as interchangeable, axiomatically assuming that collectivist societies promote interdependent rather than independent models of selfhood. Latin American societies constitute a problem case for this assumption. Existing data indicate that Latin American societies emphasize collectivist values at least as strongly as Confucian East Asian societies, but they emphasize independent self-construals at least as strongly as “Western” societies. Rather than dismiss these findings as anomalous, we make sense of them by exploring socioecological, historical, organisational, cultural, and macro-psychological differences between Confucian Asian and Latin American societies. We conclude that the common view linking collectivist values with interdependent self-construals needs revision. Global cultures are diverse, and researchers should pay more attention to societies beyond “the West” and East Asia.
How to join: Send an email to [email protected] with your name and affiliation to be added to the mail list. A link to Zoom will be sent to you before the meeting. If you are already on the mail list, you do not have to register again.