by Bruce Hood
Imagine that I have presented you with the empty boxes on the right and have asked you to draw in the missing line. There are two ways you could do this. You could either draw a line of exactly the same length (absolute solution) or draw a line that is proportionally related to the frame (relative solution). When presented with this task, Japanese participants were much more accurate with the relative solution compared to the absolute responses, whereas American participants showed the opposite profile.28 This indicates that there are cultural differences in the way we process the world: either through a piecemeal lens or more holistically reflecting the individualist versus collectivist self-construal.
When presented with the box and line on the left, participants are requested to draw a line that is either identical (absolute) or proportional (relative) in length within a smaller empty box on the right. Participants from the West are more accurate judging absolute equal length, whereas those from the East are more accurate drawing the line proportionally to the box.
What is more remarkable is that brain activation differs between individuals from independent and collectivist cultures when it comes to a number of tasks, including visual processing of complex scenes,29 focusing attention,30 mental calculation,31 self-reflection32 and reasoning about what someone else might be thinking.33 All of this evidence suggests fundamental differences in our brains and yet these differences are not cast in stone or wired into our biology. Indeed, you can temporarily shift the way people think by using priming tasks, such as getting them to read stories that either emphasize individualist or collectivist storylines, or getting them to edit a manuscript circling the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ or ‘you’ and ‘them’.34 Simply by refocusing attention on the self or others, you can shift self-construal. Indeed, after a couple of months, Americans living in Japan switch from the absolute to the relative bias, with a corresponding reversal in the opposite direction for Japanese students living in America.35
Simple manipulations can make you either more self-centred or less, and this shift in focus is mirrored by changes in brain regions activated by either self- or other-oriented thinking.36 Our brains are constantly responding and adapting to the subtle cultural context around us. When you think about it, this biocultural brain is quite spooky. Most of us from the West assume that when we visit another culture we are bringing along our Western brain and observing through Western eyes. But the research on biocultural adaptation indicates that when you spend enough time within another culture your brain will adapt to see the world in the same way that others do. Indeed, over time, cultural self-construal has changed in the West – for example, the use of ‘self’ prefixes (such as ‘self-regard’ and ‘self-made’) did not appear in the English language until the rise of individualistic Puritanism in the seventeenth century.37 The change in self-construal was partly a result of the shift in population away from close-knit village communities into the crowded, competing masses of the new industrialized cities.38
Historical events also play a role in these cultural differences. One common explanation for the independence and individualism that are fostered so strongly in the US is that it is a nation forged largely from immigrants seeking to make a better life for themselves. The American social hierarchy and values are based on meritocracy – as enshrined in the 1776 US Declaration of Independence, which states: ‘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.’ This political philosophy promotes the idea that everyone has the potential and the right to achieve success and stands in stark contrast to the prevailing class systems that many of the immigrants fled from. In Europe, you were either born into privilege or not, and there was nothing much you could do about it. In fact, social mobility was frowned upon as getting above your station in life. In the former colonies, however, the idea that one’s fate was in one’s own hands came to represent the American dream of becoming a self-made man (or woman).
Even within the US, however, there is differing self-construal from state to state, which reflects historical differences. Back in the 1920s, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the expansion and exploration into the west of the continent nurtured the ‘frontier spirit’, an independent self-sufficient ethos, as each pioneer battled the wilderness and each other for their own survival.39 Research supports this romantic view. Collectivist tendencies are strongest in the Deep South, whereas individualist tendencies are strongest in the Mountain West and Great Plains.40 Residents from the remote Midwest states score far more highly on measures of individualism compared to those on the densely packed coasts. It is probably no coincidence that someone like Donald Trump who represents the pinnacle of egocentric individualism was so popular in the former frontier states, compared to the more cosmopolitan states, during the US elections.
Probably the most compelling evidence to support this frontier hypothesis of self-construal comes from a study of Japanese residents of the northern island of Hokkaido.41 Before the eighteenth century, Hokkaido was sparsely populated wilderness. Around that time, the central feudal government collapsed and many residents on the mainland settled in Hokkaido. Just like the pioneers of the US West, the first waves of settlers were motivated to start a new life. Even though mainland Japan has a long tradition of interdependence and collectivist values, the descendants of the original settlers of Hokkaido today score much more highly on measures of independence and self-focus and are more like Westerners than their fellow citizens on the mainland. It is not simply the geographical location that determines differing self-construal, but rather the historical origins of how a community came to be established.
Things are changing, however. A recent study of seventy-eight countries over the last fifty years has shown that levels of individualism have been rising globally with increased economic development.42 (Even use of the pronouns ‘me’ and ‘mine’ has increased in collectivist cultures.43) However, the richer we get, the less we rely on other people – which is why increased economic independence is associated with increases in the divorce rate, living alone in a smaller home and not looking after your parents or grandparents.44 It seems to be a hefty emotional price to pay for getting your way. If individualism is rising globally, then this has implications for the way in which humans use and value possessions as a material component of the self. Unless materialism can be decoupled from individualism, then we need to be aware that people will increasingly look to private ownership as a way of establishing status. If this happens, we need to avoid the corresponding problems arising from over-consumption.
SELFISH ME
Sometimes we give our stuff away as a measure of who we are. The reason self-construal is so relevant to ownership is not only that it reflects our attitudes towards our possessions, but also what we do with them. Ownership entitles you to share your resources with others. You can’t share what you don’t own, nor can you share that which belongs to others. If our possessions are part of our self-construal, then the cultural differences in individualist and collectivist processing style can explain the differences observed in sharing behaviour around the world. Someone who is self-focused is less likely to be generous to others compared to someone who thinks more about other people.
As every parent knows, children have to be constantly reminded to share with others, as we all start out fairly self-centred. Jean Piaget described the mental world of the young child as egocentric and demonstrated this in his perspective-taking games. In one classic study,45 young children were seated directly opposite an adult. On the table in front of them was a papier mâché model of a mountain range with three differently coloured peaks of different sizes that were readily distinguishable. Some had conspicuous landmarks such as a building or cross on top. Children were then shown photographs of the mountain range taken from different angles and asked to select which picture matched what they could see. They were also as
ked to choose the picture that corresponded to what the adult could see. Below four years of age, children typically selected the photograph that corresponded to their own view, irrespective of where the adult was sitting. Piaget argued that this revealed they could not easily take another’s perspective because they were so egocentric. This is one reason why it is unusual to see spontaneous sharing behaviour at this age. However, from an early age, children from the East are encouraged to be less egocentric and, as a consequence, share more than their Western counterparts, which reflects their collectivist upbringing.
What is remarkable is that our selfishness never really disappears. Both children and adults donate less to charity when they are not being watched, indicating that, privately, we still retain selfish motivation.46 When they look to others, children in both urban America and rural India will reduce their sharing if stingy behaviour is modelled by an adult, but only Indian children increase their giving when generous behaviour is provided as a role model. One reason is that Eastern collectivist societies are more focused on reputation, whereas this is less of a concern for children from individualist societies.47 But again, this can be easily manipulated. In her studies of Indian and British children, Sandra Weltzien showed that both groups become more selfish simply by being asked to talk about themselves just before they are asked to share. Again, the power of priming reveals that we can be shifted in our attitudes to what we own. Sharing is flexible and context specific but strongly influenced by others’ expectations if we are reminded of them.
One of the reasons we are less likely to share our possessions is not so much that we do not think about other people, but rather we think too much about what we have. When we think about our self we are more task-focused, paying particular attention to things that are relevant to us. In a supermarket-sweep study,48 participants were asked to sort a series of images of grocery and household items into a red or blue shopping basket, based on a colour cue on the item image. They were then asked to imagine that they had won all the items in one of the baskets, so all the items pictured in it belonged to them. After the sorting was over, participants were tested to see how many items they could remember. Both adults and children as young as four remember significantly more items they are told they have won compared to the items in the other basket.49 This is known as the ‘self-reference effect’ whereby information encoded with reference to the self is more likely to be subsequently remembered than similar information encoded with reference to other people.50
The advantage for processing self-referential information registers in the brain as activity in the medial prefrontal cortex – where your temples are – but when associated with ownership also triggers corresponding activation in the lateral parietal cortex, an area further back just above your ears, which is usually active during object processing.51 In other words, as objects are processed, they are given the additional ownership tag that registers in regions of the brain that are active when we think about ourselves. This explains why activation of this self-referential and object processing network is stronger in Western compared to Eastern subjects.52 In contrast, when it comes to thinking about others, activation in Eastern subjects is stronger in brain regions that respond when reflecting about one’s relationships with others.
If Eastern ways of perceiving the world are collectivist, does that mean they are less obsessed with social status and, if so, less likely to pursue status symbols? On the contrary, Asia is one of the strongest markets for luxury goods. How can competition to be seen to be successful through conspicuous consumption square with traditional collectivist values that emphasize group identity? How can an Indian farmer spend extravagantly on a helicopter ride, if Indian society is supposedly collectivist and other-focused?
Marketing expert Sharon Shavitt argues that in addition to the individualistic–collectivist dimension, there is also a critical vertical–horizontal dimension within cultures that explains the apparent contradiction.53 Individualistic cultures with a vertical structure include countries such as the US, UK and France, where people distinguish themselves through competition, achievement and power. They are likely to endorse statements such as ‘winning is everything’ and ‘it is important that I do my job better than others’. However, individualistic cultures with a horizontal structure include such countries as Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Australia, where people view themselves as self-reliant and equal in standing to others. They are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘I’d rather depend on myself than others’, and ‘my personal identity, independent of others, is very important to me’. In contrast, collectivist cultures with a vertical social hierarchy include countries such as Japan, India and Korea, where people focus on complying with authority and enhancing the cohesion and status of their in-groups, even when that entails sacrificing their own personal goals. They are more likely to say, ‘it is my duty to take care of my family, even when I have to sacrifice what I want’, and ‘it is important to me that I respect the decisions made by my group’. Finally, collectivist cultures with a horizontal structure, such as Brazil and other South American countries, are characterized by sociability and egalitarian arrangements of assumed equality. They are more likely to endorse statements such as ‘to me, pleasure is spending time with others’, and ‘the well-being of my co-workers is important to me’.
When cultures have vertical structures, members are still going to aspire to social status through conspicuous consumption, irrespective of whether their self-construal is independent or collectivist. Cultures with horizontal structures will have more aversion to conspicuous consumption, bragging and showing off, and are more likely to promote modesty or engage in tall-poppying. These dimensions also explain why marketeers need to be sensitive to the cultural structures of countries. In Denmark, advertising appeals to individual identity and self-expression, whereas in the US, another individualistic society but with a vertical structure, advertisements are more likely to emphasize status and prestige.54
At birth, one human brain is much the same as another, but the emerging body of neuroscience research indicates that cultural self-construal manifests in different brain activation. These variations reflect historical, political and philosophical perspectives indicating that our brains are shaped by biocultural influences during development rather than through some evolutionary hard-wiring. If ownership is a major component of our self-construal, then it’s how we raise our children that determines their attitudes towards possessions.
THE PROSPECT OF LOSS
When it comes to gaining and losing possession, the values we place on ownership should reflect rational economic choices. For centuries, economics was dominated by mathematical models of supply and demand proposed by the likes of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. However, as we noted earlier in our discussion of charitable donations, this mathematical approach to understanding market trading does not take into consideration human behaviour. People do not behave rationally when it comes to buying and selling – something that successful traders have known for thousands of years. Not only can a good trader recognize a potential buyer from the emotions they portray, but they can also manipulate the customer to purchase by playing to their emotions: ‘Think how good you will look owning this!’ The hard sell is invariably an assault on the emotional weaknesses of the potential customer. Nevertheless, many scholars, including Smith and others, produced models based on rational behaviour and maximizing profits to describe how economics works. All that would change when two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, wandered the ancient streets of Jerusalem contemplating how humans actually make decisions.
We have already encountered Kahneman, but most of his Nobel prize-winning research was conducted in collaboration with his late friend and colleague Amos Tversky. They have been called ‘psychology’s Lennon and McCartney’ because of their ground-breaking and creative work.55 Both grandsons of rabbis, Kahneman and Tversky would employ the Talmudic tradition of structured debate ov
er questions such as, ‘Is it better to toss a coin to win $100 or take a sure bet of $46?’ Over and over again, they would pose questions of choice, then rely on their intuitions as an insight into the human mind. They reasoned that if some decisions seemed self-evident to them, then they were likely to be the same for other people.
This methodological approach of examining your own mind, ‘introspection’, can be traced to the origins of psychology as a science, when early practitioners such as Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner began the systematic study of subjective thresholds of perception. How bright did a light have to be before you could see it? How more intense did a tone have to be before it doubled in loudness? and so on. These pioneers of perception approached the problem like physicists looking for measurable experiences that could be mapped out in mathematical equations. They were psychophysicists measuring the non-material dimensions of the human mind.
Kahneman and Tversky used the same introspective approach to establish people’s attitudes to risk, gambling and other financial transactions. Just like the discoveries of human perception made by the early German psychophysicists, Kahneman and Tversky discovered that people’s attitudes to losses and gains were systematically biased. As an example of a bias, consider a pair of twins who do exactly the same job and have exactly the same attitudes and goals in life. Everything is identical about them. One day, their boss comes along and tells them they are due for a bonus: a pay rise of $10,000 or an extra twelve days’ holiday. As they are both indifferent individuals, they toss a coin and decide who gets the pay increase and who gets the extra holiday time. Both are equally happy with the outcome. Now imagine that after a year, their boss comes back and says that it’s time to switch over. How would each twin feel about the loss of $10,000 or the extra vacation time?