CHAPTER 2
“What do you want for breakfast, sweetie?” Hazel asked her then-four-year-old daughter, Krysia. “Cheerios? Rice Chex? Special K?”
“Special K,” Krysia answered.
“Special K for my special K? Sounds good. And what do you want to drink? Apple juice? Orange juice? Cranapple?”
“Do we have anything purple?”
“No, honey. I’m sorry. How about something orange?”
“Okay. And Mommy, can I have a turkey sandwich today, instead of peanut butter and jelly?”
“Sure, sweetie. And what would you like for breakfast, Shinobu?”
Hazel turned to a jetlagged Shinobu Kitayama, just arrived from Kyoto and staying with Hazel’s family while attending a conference.
“Uh…I’ll have what she’s having?”
“Okay. Would you like some coffee with your Special K?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Do you take it with milk?”
“Um. Sure.”
“Whole, two-percent, or skim?”
“Uh, whatever you think is best.”
A few minutes later, Shinobu politely asked, “Hazel, you gave Krysia and me a lot of choices. Is that an American thing?”
“Well,” Hazel started. But then she had to think for a moment. “Everybody likes to choose, right? It gives people a chance to express themselves, to feel in control,” she said, reflecting the consensus of her fellow psychologists at the time. “Don’t you let Lila choose her breakfast? Don’t you want to get your coffee just the way you like it?”
Shinobu considered his own young daughter back in Kyoto. “I guess we think that it’s the parents’ job to know what the children will like and then make it for them,” he said. “We usually give Lila freshly steamed rice, some vegetables, and a bowl of fresh miso soup—you know, what all the kids like. And we give her variety, of course. Sometimes we put an egg on the rice.”
Hazel held back a laugh. “But you know the research, Shinobu,” she said. “Choice makes kids happier and more creative. And just look at Krysia. She’s only in preschool, but she already knows a lot about herself.”
It was true. Krysia knew not only what she liked to eat, but also what she liked to wear—soft, not scratchy; purple, not brown. She liked Good Night, Moon more than “I Can’t,” Said the Ant. And she knew exactly what kind of cake she wanted at her birthday party: a yellow cake with pink and green buttercream flowers.
“Lila’s the same, no? She knows what she likes.”
Shinobu thought for a moment, and then sighed. “It’s true that Lila has a strong will,” he conceded. “But she’s getting much better at paying attention to other people. She’s only in preschool, but she already trusts that we know what’s best for her.”
Hazel and Shinobu fell silent for a moment, and then realized they had stumbled into two excellent research questions: What sorts of selves were they trying to raise? And what methods were they applying to this most important of endeavors?
Their breakfast ended more than twenty years ago, but their conversation continues in a collaboration that has produced hundreds of studies exploring different culture cycles and selves.1 At the beginning of this collaboration, Hazel didn’t quite know that she usually used her independent self, the one that strove to be individual, unique, influencing, free, and equal; nor did Shinobu quite understand that he tended to use his interdependent self, the one that aimed to be relational, similar, adjusting, rooted, and ranked. In general, folks don’t know their own culture’s recipe for being a self. We don’t recite the recipe every morning like a scout’s pledge or study it in school like a manifesto. Instead we learn our cultures’ recipes for how to be an appropriate self simply by living our lives. Those lives we live, in turn, are made up of the many culture cycles rolling through them.
As we discussed in the introduction, the culture cycle looks like this:
To summarize once more how the culture cycle works: Our I’s (or selves) both produce and are produced by cultures out-in-the-world, including the customs and artifacts that give shape to our daily interactions, which themselves foster and follow from cultural institutions, which in turn reflect and support our cultures’ big ideas, including ideas about what a person is and should be. Because our I’s are embedded in cultures, we cannot survive without them. In this way we are like fish in water.
Also like fish in water, we evolved so that we don’t notice culture. Indeed, as we will show throughout this book, culture is powerful precisely because it is usually invisible to the untrained eye. We are born into culturally saturated worlds, and seldom do we see or discuss how other worlds are arranged. Only when we travel to new places or, say, read a book about cultural psychology do we begin to understand how much culture shapes our selves and appreciate how many different forms cultures can take.
In this chapter, we lay bare the culture cycles that drive independence in the West and interdependence in the East. Once you understand how the culture cycle works, you will see it everywhere—in the ads you watch on television, in the policies you follow at work, in the words you say to your own kids. (Ever wonder why you are turning into your parents? Stay tuned.)
You will also have a better way to think about differences between people. Ignorant stereotyping is bad because it results in unfair treatment. But appreciating that people are cultural beings who are exquisitely attuned to their physical and social environments is a first step toward understanding why people with different backgrounds have different selves. It is also the first step to understanding why these different selves so often clash.
By knowing how the culture cycle works, you can also reverse-engineer it to calm the culture clashes that erupt in your own life. Should children choose their own way, as Western parents and teachers such as Hazel often assume, or should they do things the right way, as Eastern parents and teachers such as Shinobu, Amy Chua, and Bobby Wong’s dad believe? Should people stand out from the crowd, as Western culture cycles mandate, or should they fit in with others, as Eastern culture cycles teach? Should people openly express their thoughts and feelings through talking and emoting, as is the Western habit, or should they listen and attend to the feelings of others, as is the Eastern practice? More broadly, is the independence of the West the best way to be a self in the twenty-first century, or will the interdependence of the East prove to be the better sort of psyche for the challenges ahead?
As we discussed in the preceding chapters, our answer is that both sorts of selves will need to take pages from each other’s playbooks, and then use the culture cycle to apply both selves wisely. For their part, Western independent selves will need to get in touch with their interdependent sides to create institutions that educate everyone for the future, interactions that help students stick to their studies, and individual hearts and minds that make their classmates and colleagues of Eastern heritage feel more welcome. At the same time, Eastern interdependent selves must adopt some of the independent practices of their Western neighbors, including crafting unique ideas and then sharing them verbally. By meeting each other in the middle, Eastern and Western selves will amplify everyone’s contributions, for the benefit of all.
At the highest, most abstract idea level of the cycle, cultures have all types of big ideas that answer all types of big questions. Richard Shweder, a pioneer in cultural psychology, has traveled the world and identified the big questions that most cultures answer, including, Where did the world come from? How did things come to be the way they are? Why do things change? And, undergirding all, What is good?2
For psychologists of the self, the most important ideas are those that answer these big questions: What, exactly, is a person? What is a good person? and, What is her or his relationship to other people, the past, and the environment? As we shall see, the cycles that feed and flow from the big idea that the self is independent are quite distinct from the cycles that feed and flow from the big idea that the self is interdependent.
Built around these big ideas, the cultural worlds outside people’s bodies have just as much structure, pattern, and order as do the genes, neurons, and brain regions within their bodies. So understanding what people are and why they do what they do requires mapping not only their brains and genomes, but also their cultures’ institutions and interactions. In charting the course of your self, your postal code is just as important as your genetic code.
All selves start small, both in physical size and in the daily interactions that mold them into culturally appropriate people. Parents get the culture cycle rolling. At breakfast, for example, Hazel gave Krysia several chances to assert her independence through choice—a behavior that lets people individuate, express their uniqueness, influence their environments, exercise their freedom, and feel equal to others. But no mother or father can craft an independent self alone. So Krysia’s other family members, teachers, and friends—real and virtual—picked up the task, usually without even knowing it.
While eating breakfast, for example, Krysia tuned in to television’s Sesame Street, where she sang along with her puppet friend Grover. “Yes, I do have pride in me,” the two crooned. “I feel so satisfied in me.” And why were Grover and Krysia so proud and satisfied? The song’s answer hit the “uniqueness” note of the independent self: “Because I am so special.” (In Grover’s case, a unique pelt was the source of his high self-esteem: “I love every bright blue side of me,” he sang.).3
Hazel next drove Krysia to preschool in the family’s roomy sedan—a cultural product that lets many Americans spend hours alone every day. “It’s not just your car, it’s your freedom,” sang a General Motors radio ad. Krysia’s teacher greeted her with a hug. Like parents in many American settings, teachers understand themselves as not only guiding children, but also befriending them, reinforcing the idea that everyone must be treated as equal individuals, no matter their age or role.
To help Krysia practice choosing, the teacher asked her, “What would you like to do this morning?” She then gave the four-year-old a choice of nine activities, from coloring to gardening to playing dress-up. After lunch (Krysia’s chosen turkey sandwich and juice packet), Krysia took a nap beneath her favorite poster: a picture of a Dalmatian puppy with red, yellow, and purple spots urging the preschoolers, “Dare to Be Different.”
Next came VIP time. A preschooler named Jacob was VIP that week. Like all VIPs, he and his parents had decorated a large poster board to tell the class who he was. He had included drawings of his favorite things and pictures of himself with friends, family, and his cat. Jacob stood in front of the class and presented his poster for a full five minutes. At recess time, Jacob got to be the first out the door.
After recess, Krysia and her classmates voted on which story to hear. They selected “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” In the Western version of this widely told tale, Goldilocks exercises choice several times as she decides which of the bears’ chairs, porridges, and beds is just right for her. She then bolts when the bears return to find her sleeping in their home.
As a special treat at the end of the day, the whole class celebrated Anna’s birthday, singing “Happy Birthday” and playing her favorite game, musical chairs. Children marched around the chairs until the music stopped and they scrambled to sit in a chair. Because there was always one fewer chair than children, the child without a chair was out of the game, the teacher removed a chair, and the game continued until one of two remaining children snagged the last chair and was pronounced the winner. Although American classrooms foster equality, they also include competition from a very early age, giving children opportunities to individuate and feel great about their selves.
Meanwhile, half a world away, Lila lived out her preschooler’s day in Kyoto and took part in a different culture cycle. Before Lila awoke, her mother prepared breakfast, which she then shared with her daughter. While Lila put on her school uniform, her mother carefully prepared Lila’s lunch—a bento box of rice with small pieces of salmon, cooked vegetables, and pickled radish. Every day, Lila’s mother prepared a different bento. She never asked Lila what she wanted, but instead selected what she thought would be best for her daughter.
Lila and her mother next walked to preschool with a group of other children and parents. As the children entered the classroom, they greeted the teacher with a bow, signaling their respect and appreciation.
That day, the students drew murals together. Crayons, shiny scissors, and textured paper were close at hand. Notably, there wasn’t enough of any one supply for all students to use at the same time. Instead, the students had to share. Whereas Krysia’s teacher used scarcity (in musical chairs) to spur competition, Lila’s teacher used scarcity to encourage cooperation.
When the children descended into chaos, the teacher brought them back to attention by starting one of their favorite songs. The preschoolers quickly chimed in: “We’re all friends. We’ll be friends forever, forever,” they sang of their connections to each other. “Even when we become adults, we’ll be friends,” their song continued, polishing the “rooted” facet of the interdependent self. “We’ve played together, we’ve fought together, we’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together,” the tune concluded, emphasizing the children’s similarities.4
After lunch came nap time. Lila took her place next to the wall where her teacher had posted a beautifully hand-lettered poster with the class’s goals: “Let’s Cooperate” and “Let’s Pool Our Strengths.”
Following their naps, the children headed for the playground, first putting on their outside shoes. Changing shoes signaled the transition from student to kid—roles with decidedly different rules. Because it was the first day of the month, recess ended with a parade of all the children who had birthdays that month.
Next came story time. The teacher also read aloud “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” But in the Japanese version, when Goldilocks is caught, she sincerely apologizes to the bears for entering their home uninvited and tasting their porridge. The bears do their part to smooth things over, and then invite her to come again.
Before their parents arrived, the children cleaned up the classroom, as they did every day. In American classrooms, cleaning is either a punishment or a custodian’s job. In Japan, cleaning is another opportunity to cooperate and to reinforce the idea that environments shape the mind.
The teacher and students spent the last few moments of the day quietly contemplating how they could improve their performance the next day—a practice known as hansei. Hansei isn’t just kid stuff. In his book You Gotta Have Wa, the Japan-based journalist Robert Whiting describes how Japanese professional baseball players pursue wa (harmony with the people in your group) by writing essays about their flaws and ways to improve them.5 The image of Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire taking a self-criticism break is hard to conjure. But from a Japanese perspective, self-criticism helps everyone be part of the whole, no matter who he is or what that whole may be.
Over the course of Krysia’s and Lila’s childhoods, friends, family, teachers, employers, and even strangers continued to create everyday interactions that reinforced the kinds of selves they should be. In school, Krysia proves to be exceptionally skilled at the Socratic method, a verbal give-and-take where teachers call on students and require them to answer their questions aloud. Many schools in the West regard the Socratic method as an educational best practice.6
To occupy herself after school, Krysia chooses activities for which she has something that the adults call “ability” or “talent”: cello, math, and track and field. She attempts to follow the prescription of discovering one’s talent, applying effort, and then finding success. But she doesn’t like cello, math, or track and field, and so eventually she rejects them all.
In college, Krysia decides to major in film because it reflects her unique interests and her need to create. Yet after graduation, she turns down film jobs, moves to Central America, and opens her own socially responsible business. She eventually returns to the United States to pursue her MBA so she can better compete in the emerging field of social entrepreneurship.
For the rest of her life in the United States, Krysia will have daily opportunities to express her uniqueness, to separate herself from others, to influence her world, to exercise her free will, and to experience herself as equal to others who are as great as she is. Like many middle-class European Americans, she will see and feel the world in terms of individuals. And through her thoughts, feelings, and actions, she will perpetuate the independent culture cycle that helped make her.
Meanwhile, back in Kyoto, Lila rounds out her education by attending juku (“cram school”) several days a week so that she can meet Japan’s high educational standards. Following Confucian educational methods, she quietly listens to her teachers, working hard to master what they tell her. As with many East-Asian students, she is following a well-worn path: studying leads to ability, ability leads to success, and success leads to happiness. Education is decidedly not about discovering her unique genius, expressing herself, or having fun.
In high school, she complies with the national mantra “Fail with five, pass with four,” sleeping no more than four hours per night so as to avoid academic disaster. Despite her rigorous academic schedule, she takes up volleyball because her friends encourage her to do so. After enduring the hellish rite of passage known as the national college entrance exam, she scores well enough to attend a prestigious university. Following her father’s advice, she majors in environmental science.
During the summer, Lila takes an office job. To show her commitment, she arrives early, leaves late, and often goes out with her colleagues after work. Acknowledging their shared commitment, Lila and her coworkers depart with the standard workplace farewell, “Osaki ni shitsurei shimasu” (“I’m sorry to leave before you”). The remaining workers reply with “Otsukaresama deshita” (“You must be tired”).
For the rest of her life in Japan, Lila will have opportunities to discover how she is connected and similar to others, to contemplate how her role and rank should constrain her behavior, and to adjust her self accordingly. Like many middle-class Japanese people, she will see and feel the world in terms of relationships. And through her thoughts, feelings, and actions, she will perpetuate the interdependent culture cycle that helped make her.
Rustling, humming, and blaring alongside Krysia and Lila is a constant stream of mass media. In a single day, the average person in the United States is exposed to more than five thousand images from magazines, television, websites, and billboards.7 These cultural products both subtly and blatantly convey the right way to be a person.
In the Tokyo subway, for example, a bright yellow poster with hundreds of red fish swimming in the same direction reminds morning commuters that, when the train comes, do what the fish do: get in line. But in the United States, Madison Avenue serves up seafood with an independent twist: “Only dead fish swim with the current,” reads a Templeton Global Investments ad.
Built around the themes of individuality, uniqueness, choice, freedom, and equality, American ads hammer home the culturally appropriate way to be a self. Gerber touts that its baby foods are “a good source of iron, zinc and independence.” Gap markets its widely appealing, yet wholly unremarkable clothing with the command “Individualize.” Apple sells computers by pairing famous artists, scientists, and activists—Albert Einstein, César Chavez, the Dalai Lama—with the American mantra “Think different.” Joe Camel advises herds of impressionable youth to “Choose anything but ordinary.”
Suspecting that media in the East sell a different self, Hazel and Heejung Kim analyzed thousands of magazine ads in the United States and Korea. They found, indeed, that the ads in Korean magazines stressed interdependence, with themes of relating, fitting in, adjusting, following tradition, and observing rank. For instance, a Korean grocery store reassures young wives, “With effort, you may one day prepare pork as well as your mother-in-law.” Likewise, a red ginseng beverage’s main selling point is that it “is produced according to the methods of a 500-year old tradition.” Rather than “Ditch the Joneses,” as an American Jeep ad urges, Korean ads tend to promote more amicable actions. One university, for example, reassures readers that it “is working toward building a harmonious society.”8
Media also direct people in the East and West to express their feelings differently. In one study, psychologist Jeanne Tsai and her research team compared the bestselling illustrated children’s books in the United States and Taiwan. To test their idea that Easterners like calm emotions more than Westerners do, while Westerners value excited emotions more than Easterners do, Tsai and her colleagues did something simple but completely novel. They measured the width of the characters’ smiles.
Tsai’s team discovered that the American and Taiwanese characters beam an equal number of smiles at their young readers, but the American smiles are decidedly wider. For a typical American-made expression, think Max in Where the Wild Things Are. His grin extends across the page as he bounds through the forest announcing himself and making as much noise as he possibly can. The main character in the Taiwanese book Xiao en yue de gushi (The Story of February) also smiles, even though her eleven siblings trick her out of getting the thirty or thirty-one days she was due, and leave her with only twenty-eight. (Her father rewards her patience and restraint by giving her an extra day every four years.) But February’s smile is narrow and serene.
Women’s magazines showed the same pattern. In American glossies, the smiles are usually toothy and huge. Think Julia Roberts. But Asian fashion magazines most often feature small, closed-mouth smiles. Think Zhang Ziyi (of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame). Of course, there are always exceptions. But as a general rule, Eastern stars have subtler smiles than Western ones.9
Even religious self-help books feature different kinds of smiles, as well as different messages about the right way to feel. Joel Osteen, the pastor of a Christian megachurch in Texas that reaches more than seven million people, is the author of Become a Better You. On the cover of his book, Osteen sports the signature toothy American smile. In the book’s pages, he asserts, “I’m excited about my future,” and counsels readers to find their excitement, too.
Another bestselling self-help book is by the Dalai Lama. On the cover of his Art of Happiness, His Holiness also smiles, but gently. He urges readers to seek happiness, but advises that the happy life is built on a calm and stable mind.10
Even at international events like the Olympics, the media of different cultures produce, package, and broadcast different models of the self. Cast your memory back to the 2002 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. First stop, the pool. American swimmer Misty Hyman, gasping for breath, drags herself out of the water and realizes that she has captured the gold medal for the women’s 200-meter butterfly. The American news cameras zoom in on Hyman’s wide smile and shining eyes. A journalist asks, how did she do it?
“I think I just stayed focused,” Hyman answers. “I knew I could beat Susie O’Neil, deep down in my heart I believed it, and I know this whole week the doubts keep creeping in, they were with me on the blocks, but I just said, ‘No, this is my night.’”
Meanwhile, at the track across town, Japanese running sensation Naoko Takahashi breaks the ribbon to win the gold in the women’s marathon. The Japanese video cameras follow Takahashi for half her victory lap. Then they pan to the stands and close in on the man who made her special shoes. Next they find her assistant coaches, and then they follow her main coach for a full twenty seconds as he runs through the track house to meet her. At last coach and victor meet, and the Japanese cameras show the back of Takahashi’s head as she cries in the arms of her beloved coach.
At last a journalist catches up with Takahashi and her crew. Instead of talking about herself, the champion says, “Here is the best coach in the world, the best manager in the world, and all of the people who support me. All of these things were getting together and became a gold medal.”
The American and Japanese media broadcasted these two different scenes—Misty Hyman’s beaming face, Naoko Takahashi and her coach’s embrace—over and over again, to millions of viewers, impressing upon them not only the story, but also the right way to tell it.
To bottle exactly what those right ways were, Hazel and her colleagues trained a group of American and Japanese bilingual observers to code hundreds of hours of Japanese and American coverage of the 2000 and 2002 Olympics. The observers systematically analyzed everything the athletes, commentators, and journalists said.
Totting up the observations, the research team first found that American journalists drew on their understanding of the self as independent and talked a lot about the athletes’ personal characteristics—the powerful feet of Ian Thorpe, the robotic stride of Mo Green. When athletes won, it was because they had the right stuff. When they failed, it was because their competitors had superior personal attributes.
In contrast, the Japanese commentators drew on their understanding of the self as interdependent and focused on the expectations of important others, now and in the past. Failure was the result of not trying hard enough to do what was expected. Reflecting the Eastern tendency to criticize one’s own actions so as to know how to improve, the Japanese athletes and press made nearly twice as many negative comments as did the Americans.11
Madison Avenue and Hollywood did not write the recipe for the independent self that now pervades the West, nor did the East’s redoubtable media moguls dream up the notion of the interdependent self all by themselves. Instead, big ideas about how to be a self formed over millennia. The way people happened to do things became the way they had to do things, and cultures canonized these rules in their institutions.12 These institutions then informed the interactions and I’s downstream in the culture cycle, as well as reinforced the big ideas upstream.
Many institutions now driving and deriving from the Western independent self began in ancient Greece, where philosophers viewed the stuff of this world—trees, tables, and even people—as made up of unchanging particles that determined their qualities. A tree was made of tree particles that gave it tree qualities, just as each person was made of person particles that gave him or her person qualities.13 As a result of this philosophy, Greeks—and the Western civilizations that followed in their wake—believed that to understand an object or a person, you must first break it, him, or her down into parts.
From this view eventually emerged the Western fascination with the internal and allegedly stable causes of behavior: character, talent, intelligence, cognition, emotions, motivations, brains, frontal lobes, genes, neurotransmitters, molecules, and so on. In Western philosophy and the sciences built on it, these parts come together to make the mind a mechanical device—a switchboard, a set of gears, or a computer. And this machine, in turn, powers behavior.14
Competence is also in the mind. The Socratic method at which Krysia excelled and against which Heejung Kim rebelled is the Western teacher’s way of drawing out the student’s knowledge—much of which presumably already resides inside the student’s head. Education, Western-style, aims to develop the student’s unique mind and increase her independence from the world. The student’s job, in turn, is to develop unique ideas and then express them through talking and showing enthusiasm.15
Alongside this model of the internally steered, autonomous person arose an innovation called democracy—a form of government that allows individuals to govern themselves by making choices in the form of votes. Before democracy, leaders of Greek city-states spoke for their subjects. After democracy, individual citizens could change their worlds merely by casting a vote.
Meanwhile, in a hot and dry corner of the Roman Empire, a radical preacher was honing a different facet of independence. Named Jesus of Nazareth, this teacher not only hewed to the Jewish idea that there is only one God, but also taught that this God cared about each and every person, even the poor and the meek. Christianity’s New Testament includes many tales and parables of God’s relationship with individuals.
A millennium and a half later, a German cleric named Martin Luther took this idea to the extreme. In 1517 he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door and proclaimed that all people could have a direct and personal relationship with God without the help of priests or popes. On the heels of the Spanish Inquisition and other Catholic movements to roust out dissenters, Luther’s call to do away with the Church hierarchy was revolutionary. So was his argument that God has a special purpose for each individual—a “calling”—which good Protestants should spend their lives discovering and perfecting. The sociologist Max Weber called this set of ideas the Protestant work ethic and argued that it fueled the growth of capitalism in Western Europe and, later, in the United States.16
Much of Europe continued to get in deep with independence during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. In 1615, René Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am,” asserting that his thoughts alone had enough authority to prove his existence. John Locke, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, pushed the authority of the individual one step further by contending that individuals come first, and societies emerge only when individuals form a social contract to protect each one’s rights.
As the importance of the individual rose in Western religion, politics, and philosophy, the authority of monarchs and other leaders receded. In its place, equality and individual rights rushed in. By the time Thomas Jefferson sat down to write the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776, the balance of power between kings and subjects had been leveled: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
On the other half of the planet, people in the East came up with quite a different answer to the big questions, What is a person? What is a good person? And what is his relationship to the world and other people? Their answers weave together strands from Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, and from more local philosophies like Japan’s Shintoism.
As cultural psychologist Richard Nisbett eloquently discusses in The Geography of Thought, these philosophies view the world as constantly changing and ruled by external forces.17 Shintoism, for instance, does not spell out a rigid ideology. Instead, this oldest of Japan’s philosophies describes how people should relate to gods, ancestors, and nature. Its rituals reinforce the idea that people are but one part of a far larger, interconnected whole. Indeed, the word jibun, which Japanese people often use to refer to themselves, means “my share” or “my portion of the whole.”
All over the East, local practices mingled with the ideas of Confucius, who lived in China from 551 to 479 B.C. Confucius held that becoming a person begins in the most important social unit, the family, and requires living up to family obligations and responsibilities. “Of myriad virtues, filial piety is the first,” he wrote. Getting right with family, in turn, means respecting parents and other older relatives, minimizing their worries, bringing them honor, and protecting their reputations. Confucianism also intricately defines the ranks and roles of people in society, stressing that knowing one’s place takes precedence over expressing individuality and autonomy. People are not in this life for their own advancement or actualization, but for the advancement of their families and maintenance of the social order.
Just as Greek ideas still animate the Socratic method in the West, Confucianism informs the pedagogical techniques of the East. In the Confucian method, the first step is respecting and paying attention to the teacher. Then students must memorize the materials the teacher provides. (American parents and teachers often dismiss these techniques as “drill and kill.”) Only during the final steps of instruction are students to question the material or add their own perspectives.18
Knowledge thus resides not inside the student’s head, but out in the world. And minds, in turn, are not motors that turn and churn. Rather, they are natural phenomena like water, or living organisms like plants. According to these metaphors, the outside—wind and light, sun and soil, teachers and texts—interacts with the inside to develop a person. The self, in other words, is interdependent with its environment.
Taoism is another Chinese philosophy that spices the recipe for the self in the East. Unlike the many ancient Greek philosophies that viewed nature as stable and inherently consistent, Taoism holds that the world is constantly in flux and replete with contradictions. Rather than destroying each other, however, these contradictions require each other—just as the dark yin and the light yang in the Taoist symbol require and contain a drop of each other. Accordingly, understanding people and matter requires looking at their surroundings, rather than peering at the particles that make them up. These basic philosophical beliefs are alive and well in the ways people of Eastern heritage look outside of people, not just inside of them, to explain behavior.
A final major philosophical force that animates the East is Buddhism, which holds that enlightenment comes to people who can transcend the illusion of the self as separate and replace it with an understanding of the self as completely intertwined with other forces. As the Zen Buddhist master Tozan taught, “The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain…. They are quite independent, and yet dependent.”19
East and West are likewise both independent from and interdependent with each other. But they are growing ever more interdependent as the planet shrinks. Although their distinct culture cycles took thousands of years to form, they can be brought into better alignment with a few thoughtful changes to their institutions, interactions, and I’s.
In the West, people of Asian heritage dominate the highest-paying, fastest-growing industries. And with a solid pipeline of successful Asian students feeding the West’s best universities, their ranks are likely to swell. What can Westerners do to keep pace with their Eastern brethren?
As Amy Chua learned the hard way, you can’t just import Eastern practices wholesale into Western contexts and expect them to work. Yet a few injections of interdependence into the institutions, interactions, and I’s of the West could help us do a better job of preparing for the multicultural future.
At the level of institutions, the United States needs better standards and resources for educators and students. The No Child Left Behind Act, which marked the first time in U.S. history that Congress mandated testing at set grade levels (in the past, states established their own testing schedules), was a move in the right direction. But its narrow goals (testing only reading, writing, and math), standardized tests (which assess only low-level skills), and curiously punitive incentives have not only lowered overall student performance, but also widened the gaps between social classes and races.20
A more interdependent approach to national standards would educate the whole student with offerings of science, music, and art. This education would prepare students to be well-informed contributors to society, rather than just able competitors in the game of life. A more interdependent education system would also devote more time, money, and people to raising up the lowest-performing schools to a shared standard, rather than weeding them out.
Within classrooms and homes, teachers and parents can use more interdependent interactions to help their kids keep up with the Zhangs. Channeling kids’ choices toward jobs that actually exist would go a long way toward preparing them for the twenty-first century. In the depths of the latest recession, 10 percent of Americans were unemployed. Yet more than a million jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) went unfilled, because the U.S. education system failed to produce enough qualified graduates.21 To put this problem in interdependent terms: American schools and students were failing to meet the needs of their nation. Though Asian Americans are overrepresented in STEM, they are not numerous enough to fill in the employment gaps.
The problem, psychologist Judith Harackiewicz finds, is that Western parents are not helping their children connect the dots between studying STEM now and joining their nation’s workforce later. Instead, high school students dream about careers that fit their teenage preferences, rather than pursue careers that both satisfy their desires and meet their society’s needs. To fix this problem, Harackiewicz and her team devised a novel intervention. They randomly assigned the parents of 181 teens from high schools all over Wisconsin to receive information that linked math and science to the teens’ current and future goals. (Parents in a control group did not get these materials.) For example, one brochure coached parents on how to help their teens see the relevance of math and science to video games, cell phone use, and driving.
The remedy was small, comprising only two brochures and a website. Yet it had a big impact. Students whose parents received the materials took one more semester of math or science than did students whose parents did not get the materials. The information had empowered parents to help their children choose a path that would be more difficult in the short term, but more profitable in the long term. Although parents didn’t override their children’s choices altogether, as would be acceptable in many interdependent contexts, they did direct their children more than is customary in independent worlds.22
Another interdependent practice that would benefit Western children and adults alike is to start treating each other, and ourselves, like the dynamic and tough creatures we are. In her bestseller, Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck documents that people who view their minds as constantly growing (like plants) work harder, learn more, take bigger risks, and cope with setbacks better than do people who view their minds as fixed entities (like machines). These two mind-sets map onto the different styles of explaining behavior (situational versus dispositional) we discussed in the introduction. People with a growth mind-set think that situational causes like effort and social support drive achievement, while people with a fixed mind-set think that dispositional causes like talent and intelligence generate success. Perhaps not surprisingly, a growth mind-set is more popular among people of Eastern heritages, while a fixed mind-set is more widespread among people of Western heritages.23
It only takes a few daily practices to instill either a growth or a fixed mind-set. Want your child, spouse, or coworker to view himself as limited by his permanent attributes? Then praise him for the abilities that make him “special,” judge him for failures that reveal allegedly inherent flaws, and eventually lower your standards to protect his faltering self-esteem. Want your child, spouse, or coworker to grow into his potential? Then praise him for his effort, help him develop a realistic account of his failures, and work with him to meet high standards.24
Psychologist Angela Duckworth has similar suggestions. In her many years as an educator, Duckworth noticed that it wasn’t the kids with the high IQs who excelled. It was the kids who could throw themselves whole-heartedly and single-mindedly into a personal mission, and achieve it no matter the setbacks. To capture this ability to persevere, she developed a simple twelve-item “Grit Test,” which includes items such as “I am a hard worker” and “I have achieved a goal that took years of work.” She and her colleagues then found that grit predicts everything from which West Point cadets survive their first year to who wins the National Spelling Bee.25
Instilling growth mind-sets and grit takes more interdependence than does ingraining fixed mind-sets and baseless self-esteem. You can’t just set a high standard and then walk away; you have to establish and maintain a strong relationship to nurture the other person’s efforts. “What Chinese parents understand,” writes Chua, “is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.”26 Although taking away choices altogether will not fly for independent selves, helping people identify their weaknesses and work hard to improve them should.
While the West is getting in touch with its interdependent side for the sake of its own competitive advantage, it should also extend some of that interdependence toward the East. In a 2011 study from the Center for Work-Life Policy, Asian-American respondents were the group that felt least comfortable “being themselves” at work. Fewer than half reported that they had a professional mentor, compared to more than half of European Americans. Asian-American respondents also felt that the leadership in their organizations failed to recognize their contributions. For these and other reasons, Asian Americans hit a “bamboo ceiling” on their way up their professional ladders, and are underrepresented in the highest echelons of corporations and governments.27
To help Easterners break through the bamboo ceiling, Westerners should take a chance on Asian leaders. Although their footholds may be slipping, people of European heritage still control most of the institutions in the West, and thus have more power to change those institutions than do people of Asian heritage. Extending a little affirmative action and promoting Asians into leadership positions would go a long way toward improving Asian employees’ morale, creativity, and productivity. It would also allow Asian leaders to deploy their strengths on a larger scale. And because organizations with diversity at the top tend to perform better than organizations with more homogenous leadership, putting Asians in a higher place would likely redound to the corporate bottom line.28
Western organizations should also work harder to accommodate the work styles of their members of Eastern descent. Speaking up in a group is hard for many people, but as we discussed in chapter 1, it is even harder for interdependent selves, who are used to staying quiet so that they can better tune in to other people. Talking in groups is also more physically taxing for Asian Americans. Studies show that Asian Americans have higher levels of cortisol (a stress hormone) when speaking in formal settings than do European Americans. Giving employees the chance to contribute their ideas in writing or in informal settings can let them shine without undue stress.29
Daily interactions between people of Eastern and Western heritages could also use a tune-up. Even Asian Americans who were born in the United States feel “forever foreign” because they still field questions such as “Where are you really from?” Psychologists Sapna Cheryan and Benoît Monin captured what happens when European Americans make Asian Americans feel as though they aren’t yet members of the club. Clipboard in hand, they approached Asian-American students on campus and asked, “Do you speak English?” They then asked the students to recall as many American television shows from the 1980s as possible.
Feeling the need to defend their American-ness, these Asian-American participants spent much more time on the TV task than did Asian-American respondents who were not asked about their English-speaking ability. As we will demonstrate in the following chapters, this time spent defending one’s self against threats is time not spent on more personally and socially beneficial pursuits. And in the long term, these small assaults on the self can undermine people’s performance and motivation, robbing all of us of the contributions they could have made.30
To flourish in Western contexts, the interdependent selves of the East can likewise alter their culture cycles to adopt more independent interactions and I’s. Back at Lynbrook High School, Gail Davidson is working with teachers, students, and parents to do just that. Many of the school’s Asian-American students and their parents are holding fast to the only model of success they know: an interdependent model in which meeting expectations is the surest route to happiness. Despite their desire to excel and contribute, they do not know that school in the West has very different rules.
The teachers had already tried a variety of strategies to get students to talk more. But you can’t just tell students who grew up not talking suddenly to speak up. Sharing opinions requires that you believe you should say something, and that you have something to say. Both take cultivation. Developing your own voice, Western style, begins with preschool show-and-tell and proceeds through a twelve-grade cascade of “me-projects.” The independent culture cycle propels this process in millions of other small ways, many of them invisible.
To reveal the inner workings of this culture cycle, Davidson and her staff held a series of meetings with teachers, parents, and students to discuss Western and Eastern cultures’ different ideas about education. They invited outside speakers to describe their research on culture and learning. They learned that although talking doesn’t necessarily equal thinking, students need to be able to express themselves so they can succeed in the Western world, including at college and in their careers.
Davidson and her staff also developed practices to help students speak up in class. Rather than “cold-calling,” per the Socratic method, the teachers now “warm-call” students whom they’ve told ahead of time to prepare their ideas for sharing. And to reduce the intimidation that comes with thirty pairs of eyes and ears trained on your every move, they also convene their students in carefully composed small groups.
Global warming and the global financial crisis; epidemics and ethnic conflicts; food shortages and foundering infrastructure—the scariest problems facing modern humans are not local. Indeed, many of them spring from the fact that our world is getting smaller, flatter, and hotter than ever before. Yet when seeking solutions, we often limit ourselves to the wisdom of the village genius (or, occasionally, the folly of the village idiot).
Rather than sticking to the same old knitting and letting our differences get the best of us, the time has come for us humans to harness our diverse culture cycles for the better. Built into our species’ DNA is our ability to emulate and perpetuate cultures. Although we tend to favor our own people’s ideas, institutions, and ways of interacting, we are clever primates. We can also borrow from other people and push our culture cycles in new directions.
We can also look backward to find our way forward. The father of modern psychology, William James, never made it to Asia, but his extensive travels through the Americas and Europe revealed to him the many ways to be a self, as well as the many strengths of those many ways. “The whole drift of my education,” he wrote in his most famous work, Principles of Psychology, “goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousnesses that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also.”31
A contemporary take on James’s writings can be found in a mash-up of Krysia and Lila’s favorite preschool posters: Let’s dare to be different and pool our strengths. In the following chapters, we show how people of different genders, races, classes, regions, religions, workplaces, and halves of the globe are retreading their culture cycles to do just that.