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Benjamin Cheung

Chapter 8—Motivation

Cultural Psychology

Third Edition

Steven J. Heine

Chapter Objective

In this chapter, you will:

Differentiate between self-enhancement and self-improvement motivations

Understand how self-esteem relates to self-enhancement

Explain various processes in which people will engage to satisfy their self-enhancement motivations

Differentiate between external and internal attributions

Describe how self-enhancement differs between cultures

Explain how the Protestant Reformation led to motivation for self-enhancement

Understand how self-enhancement has changed across time

Define face

Differentiate between promotion and prevention orientation

Chapter Objective

In this chapter, you will:

Explain how face relates to promotion and prevention orientation

Understand Max Weber’s thesis on the relationships between the Protestant Reformation, work ethic, and the development of capitalism

Differentiate between entity theory of the world and incremental theory of the world

Differentiate between primary and secondary control

Understand how different cultures construe primary and secondary control

Describe cultural differences in the perception of choice

Understand the consequences of learned helplessness

Explain how fitting in and standing out are perceived differently across different cultures

Overriding Themes in This Chapter

Different cultures often approach the same tasks with different goals and different motivations, and they often focus on different aspects of the task.

Such differences can subsequently affect how people from different cultures react to people and events in their environment.

Self-Enhancement

Self-enhancement = motivation to view one self positively

Once viewed to be universal

Discussion: How does one measure self-enhancement?

Self-esteem is how positive one’s overall evaluation of oneself is.

Having high self-esteem means the person thinks he or she is really great, whereas low self-esteem means that the person thinks she or he is inferior.

Evidence that a culture promotes self-enhancement is when samples from that culture demonstrate high self-esteem, such as when 90% of European-Canadians in a study scored above the midpoint of a 4-point scale.

Self-Enhancement

Leads people to have self-serving biases

Self-serving biases = tendencies to overstate one’s attributes

Usually seen with attributes that don’t yield concrete negative feedback

Discussion: How does one maintain positive self-perceptions when faced with negative feedback?

Self-serving biases = tendencies to exaggerate how good people think they are

Usually seen with attributes that do not yield concrete negative feedback, such as when over 94% of professors think that they are above-average professors, which is not statistically possible.

But what happens when people do receive negative feedback? How do they maintain positive self-perceptions?

Self-Enhancement

Strategies for positive self-perceptions:

Downward social comparison—comparing oneself to someone who is worse off than you

Compensatory self-enhancement—acknowledging negative feedback, but then focusing on the things that one is good at

Discounting—downplaying the importance or value of the attribute

External attributions—attributing failures to external factors (environment) rather than internal factors (ourselves)

Basking in reflected glory—emphasizing one’s connection with people who are performing successfully

There are several strategies for maintaining positive self-perceptions.

1. Downward social comparison

This can be comparing with someone who played a sport worse than you, got a worse grade than you, is shorter than you (if you care about height), or anything like that. By comparing ourselves to people who are worse off than us, we tend to feel happier about negative feedback about ourselves.

This is in contrast to upward social comparison, in which we compare ourselves to people who are better than us, which generally makes us feel even worse when we receive negative feedback about ourselves.

2. Compensatory self-enhancement, in which people acknowledge the negative feedback that they received but then focus on the things that they are actually good at. For instance, if you failed your math test, maybe you might move on to thinking about how good you are at video games.

3. Discounting, which is the act of trivializing the importance of the domain in which you have just done poorly. For instance, if you just did really poorly on a math test, you might think to yourself, “What do I really need math for anyway?

4. External attributions

It is much less threatening to attribute negative feedback to external causes or things that are outside of one’s control. For example, if you did really poorly in a math test, then you might blame the bad weather, the teacher who is a jerk, how your lunch made you feel sick, and so on.

In contrast, people are not likely to engage in internal attributions, or attributing the cause to something within yourself, such as your skill or your effort.

5. One final strategy is basking in reflected glory. Specifically, when we are confronted with negative feedback about ourselves, we tend to emphasize our connection with people who are performing successfully. For example, if someone does poorly in school, in order to feel better, he or she may start identifying with the school’s sports team (if the sports team is successful) and are more likely to use inclusive pronouns like “we” or “us.”

Self-Enhancement

Discussion: If people have self-serving biases, how differently might they respond to positive feedback about themselves?

Self-Enhancement

Cross-cultural research reveals that self-enhancement is more pronounced in the West, or in WEIRD samples.

Generally, self-enhancement seems to be associated with having an independent view of the self.

Euro-North Americans

East Asians/Asian-Canadians

Discount importance of task after failure

Emphasize importance of task after failure

More external attributions after failures

More external attributions after successes

Self-Enhancement

Several alternative hypotheses have been proposed:

East Asians do not self-enhance, but rather group-enhance

East Asians would self-enhance on different traits that they find more important

Modesty norms prevent East Asians from reporting self-enhancement

Several alternative hypotheses have been proposed:

The first is that East Asians do not self-enhance, but they group-enhance more so than Euro-North Americans—and actually, Euro-North Americans are more likely to both self-enhance and group-enhance.

Another explanation is that East Asians would show self-enhancement if researchers examined traits that East Asians actually found to be important to them. There is, at best, mixed evidence for this claim and plenty of evidence showing that this is not the case.

Overall, there is much more evidence showing cultural variability.

Why Cultures Vary on Self-Enhancement

Researchers propose both proximal and distal explanations for cultural variation in self-enhancement.

Proximal explanation = effect of parental interactions and instructions

Americans and Taiwanese parents have divergent views on the importance of self-esteem (Miller, Wang, Sandel, & Cho, 2002).

So why do these cultural differences exist? What led to them?

The more proximal answer is that children learn from their parents: from their parents’ instructions and also from their experiences with their parents. In particular, Americans and Taiwanese parents have divergent views on the importance of self-esteem.

American mothers consider it central to child rearing and feel that it should be cultivated.

But Taiwanese parents feel that high self-esteem may be detrimental to the child.

As a result, American parents tend to recall more stories about their children’s past successes, whereas Taiwanese parents are more likely to recall stories about their children’s past failures.

At a societal level, American schools are more likely than East Asian schools to emphasize the development of a student’s self-esteem.

Why Cultures Vary on Self-Enhancement

Researchers propose both proximal and distal explanations for cultural variation in self-enhancement.

Distal explanation = effect of societal norms

Individualistic cultures tend to be associated with self-enhancement.

Protestant Reformation

Basic premise of individualism: People see themselves as self-contained entities.

If one has low self-esteem, then self-reliance becomes difficult to achieve.

So why do these cultural differences exist? What led to them?

For a more distal explanation for this cultural difference, we need to look at the sixteenth century and the Protestant Reformation.

From the Protestant Reformation emerged the idea of predestination, or that it was predetermined who would obtain salvation and go to heaven and who would go to hell. However, no one could tell who was going to heaven and who was going to hell.

In order to know that people were predestined to go to heaven, they needed cues, and the most important cue was certainty that they were predestined to go to heaven. Any uncertainty was seen as a sign that the person was not going to go to heaven.

This led people to interpret events around them in a positive light, ushering the beginning of a culture of self-enhancement—but that’s not the only explanation, as there are non-Protestant cultures that also self-enhance.

This has to do with having an independent view of the self, or general individualism.

Why Cultures Vary on Self-Enhancement

In accordance with that idea, evidence in the United States suggests that as the country became more individualistic, people self-enhanced more.

Face and Self-Improvement

Rather than focusing on feeling good about oneself, people in collectivistic societies focus on others feeling good about them.

Much focus placed on face = social value given by others if one fulfills obligations and expectations

Prevention orientation

Promotion orientation

It is important to note that face is more easily lost than gained.

In cultures concerned with face, people have more of a prevention orientation than a promotion orientation.

Prevention orientation: One tries to avoid negative outcomes.

Promotion orientation: One strives to secure positive outcomes.

Face and Self-Improvement

Difference in prevention versus promotion orientation affect how one responds to failures.

Prevention orientation: Focus on weaknesses to avoid future failure

Promotion orientation: Focus on successes to strive for advancement

Accordingly, after failure:

A person with a prevention orientation should persist more than a person with a promotion orientation.

East Asians engage in self-improvement.

Face and Self-Improvement

Another consequence of face is greater concern about the perspective of others and their appraisal of ourselves

People want to maintain and to enhance their face.

One way to do this is to spend resources on enhancing others’ recognition of one’s status by purchasing brand-name products

Weber’s Thesis

In 1904, Weber argued that motivations for achievement are importantly tied to cultural ideas that came with the Protestant reformation.

People have an individualized relation with God.

Each person has a “calling,” a unique God-given purpose to fulfill on Earth.

A belief in “predestination”—before one was born, it was already determined whether one was going to heaven or hell.

Weber’s Thesis

According to Weber, these ideas made it a moral duty to work to gain achievements.

People needed to find their calling and devote their lives to it.

No one knew if they were among the “elect” —those predetermined to go to heaven

one clue was that God would only reward the elect.

Since it was sinful to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, one should reinvest to further pursue their calling.

This idea became secularized and woven into the cultural fabric, leading everyone to accumulate wealth.

Accumulation of capital laid foundations for capitalism

Weber’s Thesis

Evidence in support of Weber:

McClelland (1961) showed that German Protestants had stronger achievement motivations than German Catholics.

Protestant parents encouraged their children to become self-reliant earlier than Catholic parents.

Stories of Protestant boys had more evidence of achievement motivations than stories of Catholic boys.

Weber’s Thesis

Laboratory evidence in support of Weber:

Americans, but not Canadians, who were primed with salvation-related concepts exhibited a stronger work ethic afterward.

This suggests that the Protestant work ethic has been secularized into the general American cultural fabric

American Protestants were less likely than American non-Protestants to pay attention to other people’s relational cues during work

Weber’s Thesis

Evidence inconsistent with Weber:

Self-report surveys show that countries with the highest Protestant work ethic are countries which are non-Protestant countries (e.g. Mexico, Sri Lanka, Uganda).

Agency and Control

Different cultures vary in how they exercise control.

Impacted by:

Implicit theories of the self (from Chapter 6)

Implicit theories of the world

People from different cultures vary in how they exercise control, which has to do with the different ways by which they think about the self (called implicit theories of the self) and the world (called implicit theories of the world).

We previously discussed implicit theories of the self, so we will move on to implicit theories of the world, but the idea is the same.

Agency and Control

Implicit theories of the world

Entity theory of the world

Incremental theory of the world

There are two implicit theories of the world: entity theory of the world and incremental theory of the world.

Entity theory of the world refers to the perspective that the world around you is fixed and beyond your ability to change it.

On the other hand, there is also the incremental theory of the world, such that the world is seen as being flexible and responsive to our efforts to change it.

Whether people view the world as amenable to change has consequences for how they choose to exercise control.

Agency and Control

Primary control strategies

Internal locus of control

Influence

Agency

More common in the West than elsewhere

Secondary control strategies

External locus of control

Adjustment

More common in non-Western contexts

Two types of control that people may engage in are primary control and secondary control.

Primary control has also been examined under related terms like internal locus of control, influence, and agency.

It is the control associated with engaging in behaviors that reflect a belief that one can exert influence on the world around them.

The other form of control, secondary control, is associated with ideas like eternal locus of control and adjustment.

This has to do with the control people engage in when they feel that they are not able to change the world, and so they must adjust their goals and desires and control the psychological impact of the reality.

Agency and Control

Primary control

Incremental theory of the world

Entity theory of the self

Independent view of self

Secondary control

Entity theory of the world

Interdependent view of self

Incremental theory of the self

Primary control is generally associated with having an incremental theory of the world and an entity theory of the self, and also with an independent view of the self.

The self should not have to change; it is a stable, bound entity.

The world is response to our efforts to change.

People with interdependent selves tend to have more incremental theories of self but entity theories of the world.

The self is malleable and response to efforts change, while the world is fixed and beyond our control.

People thus exercise “secondary control” = people strive to adjust themselves to accept circumstances as they are.

So just as you would expect, secondary control strategies are more common in non-Western contexts than in Western ones, while primary control strategies are more common in the West than elsewhere.

Agency and Control

Example study—Morling (2000) studied aerobics classes in the United States and Japan.

When asked why people chose the class and what they do when the instructor initiates a difficult move:

Americans were more willing than Japanese to choose classes on times more convenient for them

Japanese were more willing to choose classes based on the the class’s level.

Americans more likely than Japanese to do their own thing when the move was difficult.

Japanese were more willing to try harder to do what the instructor did.

Individual vs. Group Agency

In collectivistic societies, groups are the primary focus, rather than individuals, and groups should be seen as powerful.

This is reflected in how news outlets in different cultures report on financial scandals.

Individual versus Group Agency

American newspapers referred more to the individuals than to their companies.

Japanese newspapers referred more to the companies than to the individuals.

Making Choices

A way that primary control is perhaps most directly evident is when people make choices.

Making choices is emphasized more in North American contexts than it is elsewhere and is more common than in other cultures.

Indians take much longer than Americans in making choices.

Indians consider fewer types of actions as a choice.

For Americans, the more important an action, the more likely they view it as a choice.

For Indians, the more important an action, the less they view it as a choice.

Making Choices

Other cultures will often leave important decisions to be made by close others.

This is done with the assumption that the decision maker has the group’s best interest at heart.

In one study, children (a) chose their own computer game, (b) had their game chosen by an outgroup member, or (c) had their game chosen by their mother.

Making Choices

Euro-American children were most motivated to play the game if they chose it themselves.

Asian-American children were most motivated if it was chosen by their mother.

Making Choices

It is interesting to note, though, that having many choices can be detrimental to us.

Since making choices can deplete mental resources, Americans persist less, and make more mistakes, on tasks after making a series of choices.

Making Choices

An absolute lack of choices is generally a bad thing.

Leads to learned helplessness, which is often associated with depression

West Berlin versus East Berlin

Despite such cultural variability in the perception of choice, we do know that having an absolute lack of choices (or general inability to control life outcomes) is generally a bad thing as it leads to a state called learned helplessness, which is often associated with depression.

In a comparison between people in West Berlin versus East Berlin during the Cold War, East Berliners were more likely to exhibit signs of learned helplessness due to having less control over their life outcomes than West Berliners.

For instance, East Berliners were more likely to exhibit frowns, slumped body postures, and similar characteristics.

Motivations to “Fit In” or “Stick Out”

One domain in which choices and control come into play is in groups.

To conform, or not to conform, to the group?

Motivations to “Fit In” or “Stick Out”

Asch ran a series of famous studies on conformity.

Participants had to provide answers to an unambiguous task after several confederates gave incorrect answers.

About 75% conformed and gave incorrect answers.

Motivations to “Fit In” or “Stick Out”

This difference partly lies in cultural differences in independence/interdependence.

A key goal in interdependent cultural contexts is to achieve belongingness with others.

This is facilitated by trying to fit in.

In independent cultures, people are motivated to highlight their distinctiveness, which fosters a sense of independence.

Motivations to “Fit In” or “Stick Out”

Such motivations to conform extend to preferences for objects.

When given a group of colored pens where some colors were in the majority and others were in the minority:

East Asians tended to choose majority pens

European Americans tended to choose minority pens

Transmitting Motivations

Cultural messages are commonly expressed in advertisements.

These are parts of the cultural dialogue that feed off of, and perpetuate, cultural norms.

Analyses of magazine ads have been compared across the United States and East Asia regarding the use of themes of uniqueness and conformity.

Transmitting Motivations

American ads contain more themes of uniqueness than fitting in.

Korean ads contain more themes of fitting in than uniqueness.

Transmitting Motivations

It is interesting to note that uniqueness and fitting in also mean different things across cultures.

While many in the West strive to resist conformity, it is seen as a sign of immaturity in East Asia.

Summary

Self-enhancement is not a universal phenomenon and is contrasted with self-improvement.

Concerns about face in some cultures lead them to have a prevention orientation, which is contrasted with having a promotion orientation.

The importance and definition of “choice” differ across cultures—even in terms of who makes the decisions.

Discussion

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