Abstract
Cultures vary considerably in the views of self that are historically constructed and tacitly shared therein. In European-American cultures there is a strong belief in the independence of self from others, giving rise to a major life task of discovering, confirming, and expressing positively valued internal attributes of the self. By contrast, many Asian cultures do not value such independence. Instead, they emphasize the interdependence of self with others. A major life task of these cultures involves forming and maintaining a social relationship of which the self is seen as its meaningful part. In turn, these cultural views of self as independent or as interdependent shape the very nature of social psychological processes that have traditionally been assumed to be cross-culturally invariant. Within this theoretical framework, cross-cultural differences in a variety of psychological processes including cognition, emotion, and motivation are reviewed and integrated. Implications are discussed for future directions of social psychology in Japan.
