Cultural psychology
Chapter 8
Motivation

Motivations for self-enhancement and self-esteem

 Self-enhancement is the motivation to view oneself positively.

Self-esteem is the positivity of your overall evaluation of yourself.

Self-serving biases are tendencies for people to exaggerate how good they think they are. One important reason people have such biased views of themselves is that they are motivated to view themselves positively. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence people are likely to interpret the evidence in the most favourable way or just round upwards when given half the chance.

To secure a positive self-view, people can engage in: 1)Downward social comparison, when someone compares his or her performance with the performance of someone who is doing even worse than him/her. That casts the own performance in a positive light. Upward social comparison is when you compare with someone who does better than you. 2) Compensatory self-enhancement, when someone focuses on something positive but unrelated to a setback. You can compensate for the pain of a failure can again self-enhance by recruiting other kinds of positive thoughts about yourself. 3) Discounting the setback, reducing the perceived importance of the domain in which you performed poorly. 4) Making an external attribution to poor performance, attribute the causes of actions to something outside themselves. In an internal attribution people locate the cause within themselves. 5) Basking in the reflected glory of a successful group to which you belong.

Cultural variation in self-enhancing motivations

Motivations for positive self-views are powerful and pervasive.

Even at a young age, there is evidence for cultural variation in positive self-views.

Independence and self-enhancement are related. Differences in positive self-esteem are sustained by the ways people attend to and interpret events in the world.

Research on self-enhancing tendencies among people of East Asian descent shows a striking lack of enhancement motivations. East Asian samples show the opposite strategies than described above.

One possibility is that East Asians are just as motivated as Westerners to evaluate themselves positively,  but biases in methodologies prevent us from seeing these motivations.

But, East Asians’ relatively self-critical views appear to generalize from their individual selves to their groups.

Another possibility is that East Asians value a different set of traits from those that have been explored by research so far. But, research doesn’t support this.

Another possibility is that these studies are not measuring people’s true feelings but are instead tapping into differences in cultural norms for describing oneself.

Overall, the research provides converging evidence that East Asians do not have as strong a desire to view themselves positively.

Origins of cultural differences in self-enhancement

People learn self-enhancement motivations as they grow up in their culture.

The notion of individual selves didn’t really emerge in Western literature until the 12^th century.  

Predestination is the idea that before people were born, it had already be determined whether they would be one of the fortunate ‘elect’ who would spend eternity in blessed heaven after passing in Protestant belief. Any doubt regarding whether an individual was the elect was to be seen as proof that the person was not, so individual became highly motivated to interpret evens in their lives a s signs that God was viewing them favourably. The distinction between spending eternity in heaven was a sufficient motivator to lead people to make great efforts to interpret their situations in a favourable light. Is might be why motivations for self-enhancement grew.

When one’s beliefs stat to migrate the idea ‘I’m all that I’ve got’, there would seem to be a greater need to view oneself positively. Cultural messages common in individualistic cultures encourage people to be self-sufficient and not to rely on others. It would be extremely difficult to achieve these goals if one did not view oneself positively. This suggests that as cultures become more individualistic, rendering people more concerned with being able to take care of themselves and to carve their own paths, there should be a corresponding motivation to view oneself positively.

An alternative perspective is that motivations for self-enhancement are stronger in some cultures not due to individualism but rather to economic inequality, as people are motivated to think of themselves as better than others when there are pronounced differences in economic opportunities.

Motivations for face and self-improvement

One way of having a positive self-view is to have high self-esteem. Another way is to have a good deal of ‘face’. Face is the amount of social value others give you if you live up to the standards associated with your position. The higher your social position, the greater the amount of face available to you. Face can be shared by groups.

In hierarchical, collectivist societies, face takes on special importance. What matters is not how positively you think of yourself, but whether significant others think you’re doing well. If others grant you face, you’ll enjoy all the perquisites that come with the enhanced status and power. In such a cultural context, people can become highly motivated to maintain and enhance their face.

Face is more easily lost than gained. Face is always vulnerable, and because others determine a person’s face, people must count on the goodwill of others to be able to maintain their face. Given that face is easily lost, a good strategy is for people to adopt a cautious approach and try to ensure that they are not acting in a way that might lead others to reject them. If they can attend to any potential weaknesses and work toward correcting them by improving themselves, they should decrease the chance that others will view them as having face.

Prevention orientation is a kind of defensive, cautious approach to not losing something. Promotion orientation is a concern over advancing oneself and aspiring for gains.

There is greater prevention orientation in people concerned with face. They also focus their efforts on things they don’t do well, whereas people striving for promotion avoid these things.

Self-improvement motivation is a desire to seek out potential weaknesses and work on correcting them.  

Face involves a concern of how others are viewing oneself. Unlike self-esteem, which involves the individual evaluating himself or herself, face is maintained only when others evaluate oneself positively.

Religion and achievement motivation

Weber viewed capitalism as the product of people’s deriving meaning from a particular context. The ideas that become the foundation for capitalism were the ones that grew out of the protestant reformation. Protestantism initially emerged as a reaction to some perceived corruption in the medieval Catholic Church. One idea to emerge from Protestantism was the notion that individuals were able to communicate with God directly and thus were not dependent on the church as an intermediary. As a result, Protestants emphasized literacy training more so that people could read the Bible themselves. The individualized relation that formed between each person and God has been argued to be central to the blossoming of individualism.

A related idea is that each person has a calling, a unique God-given purpose to fulfil during his or her mortal existence. This made working a spiritual task.

You might expect that, if their fates are predetermined, people might respond deciding to have a good time while on earth. It was believed that God would not reward those who were doomed to burn in hell, so any sign of material success was perceived evidence that one was of the elect. Because one’s time on earth was to be spent serving God through one’s calling, any accumulated wealth was to be reinvested to further one’s efforts and to accumulate even more wealth.

Agency and control

The most fundamental way that culture can shape motivations is through perceptions of control. Getting what we want requires us to make efforts that are constrained by what our cultures lead us to believe about how the world works.

One theory people have that is relevant to the experience of control is whether they perceive their identities to be easily malleable and changeable or stable and fixed. In addition, we have implicit theories about the malleability of the world. 1)  Entity theory of the world, seeing the world as something that is fixed and beyond our control to change 2) Incremental theory of the world, perceiving the world as flexible and responsive to our efforts to change it.

To the extent that different cultures perceive selves and their social worlds to be more or less fluid, they will possess different theories about how individuals can, should, and do act.

Primary and secondary control

Two ways people can gain control in their lives are: 1) Primary control, striving to shape existing realities to fit perceptions, goals, or wishes. An internal locus of control. 2) Secondary control, attempting to align yourself with existing realities, leaving the realities unchanged but exerting control over the psychological impact of these realities. Adjustment, and external locus of control.

Cultures differ in the extent to which people engage in these strategies. In hierarchical collectivistic cultures, the social world remains somewhat impervious to efforts by a lone individual to change things. The individual is perceived to be more mutable than the social world, so people are willing to adjust themselves to fit in better with the demands of their social worlds.

People from Western cultures tend to stress the malleability of the world relative to the individual. The view of self as an immutable entity, working within the context of a mutable world, sustains a perception of primary control.

Socializing experiences lead people to seek strategies of control that are most likely to lead to beneficial consequences within the constraints of their respective cultural environments.

People in collectivist cultures see groups as agents in similar ways that people in individualistic cultures see individuals as agents.

Making choices

One way that people can exercise control over their worlds is by making choices. Choice is valued everywhere. The extent to which people value choice, and exercise it, is influenced by the contexts they are in. More choices are available to individuals acting alone than to those who are part of an interdependent network. When individuals share the same goals as their group, the limits on their choices are likely not experienced as aversive.

In individualistic societies, people are less dependent on the actions of others than they are in collectivistic cultures. People in collectivistic cultures are more concerned with the goals of their groups and more willing to adjust behaviours to coordinate with the actions of the group toward those goals.

There is a differences in how choices are viewed across cultures. They mean something different in different contexts. They don’t reflect personal preferences in collectivistic cultures.

In general, making individual choices seems to be especially values in individualistic cultures.

Motivations to fit in or to stick out

On many occasions when we’re deciding how to behave in a group, we can decide to go either of two ways 1) Strive to act in a way that fits in well with others, increasing group harmony at the expense of our own individual distinctiveness 2) Act in such a way that we stick out form others, highlighting our uniqueness at the potential risk of not getting along so well with others

Often when we feel that we’re making a unique choice, we’re really making a choice that allow us to fit in to consensually agreed-upon norms for how to good, interesting, responsible people behave. We are conforming, even when we’re not aware of it.

People tend to take an active dislike to those who won’t conform.

People from cultures that are more socially cohesive are more willing to conform.

People with independent views of self see their identity as ultimately grounded in their individual qualities. Maintaining a view of oneself that is consistent with cultural values of independence, should be aided by striving to view oneself as a unique and special individual.