"Agency and Identity, American Style"

a presentation by

Hazel Markus

Thursday, November 18, 2004
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Reading: "Models of Agency: Sociocultural Diversity in the Construction of Action," by Markus and Kitayama.

Abstract: Being a person is a culturally saturated process that entails engagement with culture-specific sets of meanings and practices, what we will call sociocultural models of agency, and there are marked variations in these models of "how to be." According to a pervasive European-American cultural model, actions should be primarily the result of one's own desires, goals, intentions, or choices; the self is foregrounded while others remain in the background. A model of agency as disjoint is widely distributed and reflected in middle class material artifacts, structured social interactions, and institutional practices. In different cultural contexts what it means to be a person, the ways of being a person, and, in particular, the experience of how one is connected to others and how others are implicated in one's own actions can vary quite dramatically. In a conjoint model of agency, others are formative of agency; actions require the consideration and anticipation of the perspective of others and are a consequence of adjusting to each other, of the fulfillment of reciprocal obligations or expectations, and of improving the fit between what one is doing and what is expected. Studies comparing features of American (both middle class and working class) and Japanese contexts, as well as studies comparing the responses of individuals engaging in these contexts, suggest that differences in models of agency can explain cultural variation in a wide variety of psychological experience including motivation, choice, cognitive dissonance, creativity, and well-being.

Hazel Rose Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences and the Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Before joining the Psychology Department at Stanford in 1994, Professor Markus served on the faculty at the University of Michigan where she held the Helen Peak Professorship of Psychology and was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award. Professor Markus is the author of more than 100 publications, most of them focusing on the role of the self in regulating behavior and on the ways in which the self is shaped by the social world. She recently co-edited a book entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: the Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and is currently working on two different book projects: Well being, American style and Constructing the Self. For her distinguished contributions to the field of social psychology, Professor Markus was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and received the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Donald Campbell Award in 2002. Her area of research is concerned with how gender, ethnicity, religion, social classcohort, or region or country of national origin may influence thoughts and feelings, particularly those that are self-relevant.Ê