Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1989, Vol. 56, No.

1,124-131

Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-35l4/89/$00.75

Culture and Self-Perception in Japan and the United States

Steven D. Cousins University of Michigan
I examined the influence of cultural meaning systems on the perception of self among Japanese and American (United States) college students. Given the importance of social context to the Japanese self as compared with the U.S. self, I used two types of free-response format: the noncontextualized Twenty Statements Test (TST), and a contextualized questionnaire asking subjects to describe themselves in various situations. Consistent with prior research, on the TST Japanese subjects listed fewer abstract, psychological attributes than did American subjects, referring more to social role and behavioral context. On the contextualized format, however, this trend was reversed. Japanese scored higher on abstract, psychological attributes than did Americans, who tended to qualify their selfdescriptions. In addition, on the TST Japanese surpassed Americans in the number of highly abstract, global self-references. Results point to the impact of divergent cultural conceptions of the person rather than differences in cognitive ability on the perception of self in these two cultures.

Person perception in preliterate, non-Western cultures has been described as "concrete" in its focus on situation-bound behavior and social role, rather than on abstract personality traits or dispositions (Hallpike, 1979; Luria, 1974/1976; Werner & Kaplan, 1956). Such concreteness is usually ascribed to a cognitive inability to summarize consistencies of behavior over various contexts in the form of dispositions, or to a premodern social environment in which such abstract thinking about people is not needed. Cognitive or experiential deficits are thus seen to keep certain non-Western cultures from perceiving the person as independent from the concrete contexts of daily life. This study looked at one type of person perceptionthe perception of selfin Japan and the United States. Japan is unique among non-Western cultures in its status as a fully industrialized, modern nation. Yet many observers have noted the persistence of concrete modes of thought (Ishida, 1974; H. Nakamura, 1964) corresponding to a Japanese self "subordinate" to social role and behavioral context (DeVos, 1973; Miyoshi, 1974; Nakane, 1970). In a recent study, moreover, Bond and Tak-sing (1983) found Japanese self-descriptions to be "more concrete" (p. 162) than those of Americans. The question occurs: If Japan is thoroughly modern, what is the source of such concreteness in the perception of self?

things as part of the real-life settings from which they normally take their meaning (e.g., "the flower that grows on the hill" and "the flower that grows in the valley"), rather than to mentally isolate objects or their attributes (e.g., stems or petals of a flower) and generalize across contexts on the basis of conceptual similarity (e.g., "they are both flowers"). In the case of person perception, concrete thinking implies a perceptual boundedness to the behavior of everyday contexts (e.g., "He loans us money when we run out"; "He gives us presents when he visits us") and a tendency not to abstract features of behavior from such contexts, as observed over time (e.g., "He is generous").

Cognitive and Experiential Interpretations

Explanations of concrete modes of thought in non-Western cultures have focused on the cognitive capacity to differentiate attributes from context, a capacity held to evolve over ontogeny according to universal laws of cognitive growth (Hallpike, 1979; Inhelder & Piaget, 1964; Werner, 1948). The theoretical basis for much cross-cultural .research in cognitionthe work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1954, 1967)assumes a progression from an initial stage of concrete, stimulus-bound perception to later, more mature thought capable of abstracting veridical categories from beneath surface content. Many crosscultural studies based on these premises have assigned preliterate peoples to early, concrete stages in the Piagetian scheme (see Dasen, 1972, for a review). More recently, Piaget's ideas have been applied to the development of self-perception along a concrete-abstract spectrum (Harter, 1983) and to the evaluation of self-awareness in non-Western cultures (Hallpike, 1979; Livesley & Bromley, 1973). Other theorists, although sharing the basic assumption of a stagelike progression from concrete to abstract thought, have stressed the influence of modernization, including education and urbanization, on abstract thinking (Goody, 1977; Greenfield, 1972; Horton, 1967). In more economically and institutionally complex societies, it is held, the ability to generalize by means of abstract categories is highly adaptive and thus fostered.
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Interpretation of Abstract-Concrete Dichotomy in Cross-Cultural Research

Typically, in cross-cultural research the term concrete refers to a boundedness to perceptual stimuli, a tendency to perceive

I wish to thank Reiko Koide, Kazuhiko Hata, Mieko Kashiwabara, Kunihiko Fukamaki, and Masato Mitsutake for their assistance in collecting data, and Richard Nisbett and Harold Stevenson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am grateful to Hazel Markus for her thoughtful advice on all stages of this project, and to Toko Cousins for her support and insight into Japanese ways of thinking. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Steven D. Cousins, t)aikoku Machi 4-3, Nagasaki-shi 850, Japan.

CULTURE AND SELF-PERCEPTION Over the past two decades, however, research in cognitive development has cast doubt on these notions (see Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983, for a review). Evidence now suggests, for example, that a person's thinking does not reside in a given stage, and that abstract processes vary widely with the task (Gelman, 1978). Children as young as 3 years of age have demonstrated some capacity for abstract classification (e.g., Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). Moreover, the effects of schooling and urbanization on abstract thinking have proven to be localized rather than global, limited to those skills especially useful in modern settings (Cole, Sharp, & Lave, 1976; Scribner & Cole, 1981).

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1982; Heelas & Lock, 1981; G. M. White & Kirkpatrick, 1985), systematic, empirical studies are rare. In one of the few such studies available, Luria (1976) asked central Asian peasants to describe positive traits as well as shortcomings in themselves, and found that subjects referred instead to everyday settings and events. Luria's interpretation of his data is consistent with the emphasis on cognitive deficits: the task of analyzing one's own psychological features or subjective qualities went beyond the capabilities of a considerable proportion of our subjects.. . . Typically, they replaced a characterization of intrinsic qualities by a description of concrete forms of external behavior. (1976, p. 147) In contrast to the preliterate peasant villages of Luria's (1976) study, Japan is a modern society comparable to the United States in industrial and scientific achievement, with a literacy rate of over 99%. One might predict, then, the presence of abstract thinking typical of Western cultures. Oddly enough, Japanese modes of thought are often described as primarily concrete (e.g., Ishida, 1974; Yukawa, 1967). H. Nakamura (1964), for example, has claimed that the Japanese focus on the "immediate, concrete details of life" and "habitually [avoid] summations of separate facts into broad statements about whole categories of things" (p. 192). This claim finds support, moreover, in a recent study of self-perception among college students in Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States, using the TST (Bond & Tak-sing, 1983). According to the authors, the high number of Japanese responses in the categories of choice, aspiration, and personal fact, together with a low frequency of psychological attributes, suggests "a tendency not to describe the self by abstracting features of one's behavior across situations" (p. 163). In making sense of such concrete trends, one might argue that Japan's emergence as a modern state is still recent and that culture-wide changes in certain abstract skills have not yet caught up. Yet this is difficult to reconcile with, among other things, Japanese students' far surpassing their American counterparts in the abstract fields of science and math, not just in pure knowledge but in application (e.g., Stevenson, Lee, & Stigler, 1986). The small use of psychological attributes on the TST also cannot be ascribed to linguistic deficits (cf. Jesperson, 1934), given the Japanese language's extensive vocabulary of emotions and personality traits (e.g., Hamano, 1987; A. Nakamura, 1979). In view of the paradox of such concrete thinking in Japan, this study looked at the possible role of culture as an alternative variable in the perception of self. What cultural meanings might be relevant to the study of self in Japan and the United States? The previously mentioned individualistic and sociocentric views of the person offer a starting point.1 Individualistic premisesportraying the person as
1 Although the individualism-sociocentrism dichotomy is often used to distinguish Western from non-Western concepts of the person, it should be pointed out that there are many variations (historical as well as cultural) of both individualism (e.g., Gaines, 1984) and sociocentrism (e.g., Geertz, 1975; G. M. White & Kirkpatrick, 1985). Thus, Indian sociocentrism is not the same thing as Japanese sociocentrism, although discussion of this distinction is beyond the scope of this article (see, for example, H. Nakamura, 1964).

Cultural Interpretation
Several recent studies, although confirming the presence of concrete thinking in non-Western cultures, nonetheless depart from cognitive or experiential explanations, pointing instead to the influence of culture on social perception (Miller, 1984; Shweder & Bourne, 1984). These studies rely on symbolic anthropology's definition of culture as an intersubjectively shared yet often implicit matrix of meanings structuring the perception of self and world (Geertz, 1973,1975; Schneider, 1976). By this view, cultural diversity in abstract thinking follows not only from differences in cognitive skill or environmental complexity, but also from the predisposing and constitutive effects of divergent cultural premises. Such premises have no necessary empirical basis, but are historically transmitted products of the collective imagination (Sahlins, 1976; Shweder & Bourne, 1984). Accordingly, social phenomena such as "self" or "person" may have more than one possible conceptual representation, depending on the cultural meanings brought to bear in their interpretation. Shweder and Bourne (1984)$sked subjects in India and the United States to describe close acquaintances, and found Indians' descriptions to be more concrete and cpntextually qualified than those of Americans. In the same vein, Miller (1984) compared attributions of Americans with those of Indian Hindus, and showed that adult Americans refer more to personal dispositions than do their Hindu counterparts, who tend to attribute behavior to the situation. On the basis of separate tests of subjects' abstract thinking, including sorting and labeling tests in which Indians fared as well as did Americans, the authors of both studies ruled out cognitive deficits, citing instead the impact of indigenous cultural meaningsand concepts of the person in particularon how people are perceived in these two cultures. They distinguished between individualistic (American) and sociocentric (Indian) concepts of the person. Whereas the individualistic view stresses autonomy, self-aggrandizement, and the sense of personal inviolability apart from society, the sociocentric view holds the person to be fundamentally related to others, stressing empathy and the readiness to adjust one's behavior to the situation or group. Sociocentric cultural premises rather than a lack of abstract skills are seen to cause Indian subjects to focus on interpersonal context and actual behavior.

Aim of Present Study

Although ethnography has provided many detailed accounts of how self is perceived in non-Western cultures (e.g., Fogelson,

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STEVEN D. COUSINS backgrounds and are part of large, urban settings. The University of Michigan is a highly ranked state university, similar to Keio and Hyogo in the socioeconomic diversity of its students, although less selective than Keio in its admissions standards.

a situation-free, discrete agentinduce a search for transcontextual regularities of behavior. Sociocentric premiseslocating selfhood in human relatedness and mutualitydirect attention to concrete, social contexts, where such mutuality is experienced. A sociocentric ethos might thus lead to concrete trends in self-perception where cognitive or experiential deficits do not exist. Indeed, many anthropologists working within the symbolic tradition have described a sociocentric idiom of personhood in Japan (Edwards, 1987; Lebra, 1976; Plath, 1980; Smith, 1983). Lebra (1976) denned the ethos of Japanese culture as "social relativism": an all-encompassing concern among the Japanese with human relationships and social interaction. This is not merely the "other-directedness" (Riesman, 1950) of a Western ego; as Kimura (1972) pointed out, selfness in Japan is not a unitary abstraction to be found within the person, but a social entity whose meaning is intimately linked to relationships with others and to the situation one is in. This is well reflected in the Japanese word for se\f,jibun (g#), originally meaning "one's share" (Kimura, 1972, p. 154), or by implication, the share of a given context that is oneself. Hamaguchi (1985) described the Japanese as "relational actors" or "contextuals" for whom the primary referent in social experiencewhat gets objectified as the basis for social behavioris not the sovereign ego, but rather the person-in-human-nexus. Given the importance of social context to the Japanese self, then, the presence or absence of situational cues on a free-response format should influence how that self is expressed. By requesting subjects to respond 20 times to the single question "Who am I?" the TST isolates self from social nexus, and may discourage descriptions of personality among Japanese. As Hamaguchi (1985) has suggested, trait terms used by Japanese tend to characterize an actor system, including the context, as distinct from a separate, bounded ego. Perhaps, then, it is mainly in context that the rich Japanese lexicon of personality takes on meaning. Accordingly, in this study I used a contextualized free-response questionnaire in addition to the TST. I predicted that the contextualized format, asking subjects to describe themselves in specific settings such as home or school, would allow Japanese to refer more to personal styles and dispositions. A finding of such responsescomprising abstract summaries of behavior across one's experience in a given contextwould support the idea that Japanese do think abstractly about the self, given a frame of reference conducive to a sociocentric idiom.

Instruments
Instructions to the TST were written at the top of the answer sheet as follows: In the twenty blanks below please make twenty different statements in response to the simple question (addressed to yourself), "Who am I?" Answer as if you are giving the answers to yourself, not to somebody else. Write your answers in the order they occur to you. Don't worry about logic or importance. Go along fairly fast. These instructions were followed by 20 blank lines beginning with the words "I am". The contextualized free-response questionnaire consisted of the request, "Describe yourself in the following situations:" followed by the phrases "at home," "at school," and "with close friends." Both questionnaires were translated into Japanese, and checked by back-translation into English for use with the Japanese sample. Questionnaires were administered in class during a regular session, with subjects in both countries averaging 20 min to fill them out. The TST was presented first, followed by the contextualized questionnaire. Although some have assumed that the order of responses on the TST implies salience of those responses in the subject's self-concept (Gordon, 1968), others have questioned this assumption (Brown & Ferguson, 1968). To address this problem, subjects were asked to choose the five responses most important to their concept of themselves. On the top of the second page were written the instructions: Now, go back to the first page and place a check mark next to the five responses that are most important to your overall evaluation of yourself. By important we mean that you would be very upset if you were suddenly to discover that you were different from this.

Coding Scheme
The present study made use of a TST coding scheme developed by McPartland, Gumming, and Garretson (1961), and later revised by Hartley (1970). Although not originally intended for such a purpose, this coding scheme offers a highly suitable method for the cross-cultural comparison of self-percepts along the concrete-abstract spectrum. Known as the A-B-C-D fourfold method, it consists of four basic categories of self-percepts, each representing a different level of abstraction from the physical, phenomenal realm (Hartley, 1970): A. Physical. References to observable, physical attributes of self, which do not imply social interaction, such as the information one finds on a driver's license (e.g.," 18 years old," "5'7" tall"). B. Social. References to social role, institutional membership, or other socially defined status (e.g., "a college student," "a ballerina"). C. Attributive. References to self as a situation-free agent characterized by personal styles of acting, feeling, and thinking (e.g., "friendly," "moody," "ambitious"). D. Global. Self-references that are so comprehensive or vague as to transcend social role and social interaction, and which therefore do not convey individual characteristics of the respondent (e.g., "a human being," "an organic form"). After the data were collected, early analysis led to an elaboration of the attributive (C) and global (D) categories into five and two subdivisions, respectively (see Table 1). For the most part, these subdivisions correspond with broad category descriptions offered by Hartley (1970),

Method Subjects
The sample consisted of 159 Japanese college students from Keio University in Tokyo (42 men and 54 women) and Hyogo Educational University in Kobe (63 women), and 111 American college students from the University of Michigan (50 men and 61 women). Although it is difficult to ensure complete comparability among samples, the educational level and socioeconomic position of the schools studied are roughly equivalent. Keio is one of the two most prestigious private universities in Japan, and Hyogo is known as an outstanding public university. Both schools have students of varying socioeconomic

CULTURE AND SELF-PERCEPTION although not systematized by her in this fashion, and also draw on distinctions found in Gordon's (1968) coding scheme. As shown in Table 1, attributive (C) responses include the subcategories of preference (C 1; e.g., "one who likes chocolate ice cream"), wishes (C2; e.g., "one who hopes to become a doctor"), and activities (C3; e.g., "one who reads science fiction books"). In addition, a distinction was made between "qualified" psychological attributes (C4) and "pure" psychological attributes (C5), inspired by a similar distinction in the coding scheme of Shweder and Bourne (1984). In brief, any psychological attribute was regarded as qualified if it included reference to other people (e.g., "I am silly with close friends"), to time (e.g., "I am grouchy in the morning"), or to locale (e.g., "I am talkative in class"). Pure attribute responses (C5) are, by contrast, free from such contextual qualifications: "I am honest." No attempt was made to stratify all five attributive (C) subdivisions as to levels of abstraction, but it was assumed that pure attributes (C5) were the most abstract, followed by qualified attributes (C4). Although both global (D) subdivisions designate references to self as abstracted from social role and social engagement, the existential (Dl) category consists of highly private statements of self as unique and individuated (e.g., "myself," "a unique creation"), whereas universal (D2) statements suggest membership in a universal, undifferentiated category (e.g., "a mammal," "a product of my environment"). Numerous composite codings were developed to accommodate meaning units combining more than one category, and responses not readily fitting into the fourfold scheme were designated as "other." These latter responses included statements about the immediate situation (e.g., "I am hungry"), judgments about self imputed to others (e.g., "I am considered good at sports"), "nonsense" statements in which the question "Who am I?" seemed to be evaded or rejected (e.g., "a penguin"), modified physical (A) statements (e.g., "too short"), and modified social (B) statements (e.g., "a mediocre student"). With a few minor changes, the coding scheme of Table 1 was applied to the contextualized format, permitting comparisons between the two instruments. Certain types of responses (e.g., physical A, universal D2) did not appear on the contextualized format, whereas one additional category, object (O), was added for descriptions of other persons or objects in which there is no reference to self (e.g., "My piano is out ofkey"). The unit of analysis for both questionnaires was the independent clause consisting of no more than one verb-object, verb-predicate nominative, or verb-predicate adjective sequence, for example, "I am

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Table 2 Proportion of Category Use by Culturefor Twenty Statements Test (TST) and Contextualized Format
TST (top five)

Contextualized United States

.028 .067*** .051** .137 .353*** .257 .006 .074***

Type of statement (A) (B) (Cl) (C2) (C3) (C4) (C5) (Dl) (D2) (0) Physical Social Preference Wish Activity Qualified attribute Pure attribute Existential Universal Object

United States
.024 .093 .035 .016 .013 .091 .578*** .041 .007
"p<.00l.

Japan .048* .274*** .072** .049** .084*** .086 .186 .046 .050***

Japan
.046 .012 .026 .156 .221 .412*** .021 .010

'p<.05. **/><.01.

usually friendly and affectionate, but can be mean to certain people" (three units) or "I like playing cards with my friend, because I always win" (two units). All protocols were scored in their original language. Coding reliability was assessed among the author, an American assistant, and a bilingual Japanese assistant on a set of Japanese and American protocols chosen at random. (Japanese responses were translated into English for the American assistant.) Overall agreement on coding assignments between the author and the Japanese coder reached r = .88, whereas that between the author and the American assistant reached r=.86.

Results
To control for variation in the number of meaning units per protocol (for both the TST and contextualized format), all calculations were based on the proportion of responses in a given category to the total number of meaning units found on each protocol. Because there was a preponderance of women in the Japanese sample relative to the American sample, t tests were run to compare Japanese women and men on all scoring categories. Analysis showed no significant differences by sex for any scoring category on the TST, and only one such difference on the contextualized format, suggesting that gender imbalance within the Japanese sample did not affect the results.2

Table 1 Outline of Coding Scheme A. Physical B. Social C. Attributive 1. Preferences, interests 2. Wishes, aspirations 3. Activities, habits 4. Qualified psychological attributes 5. Pure psychological attributes D. Global 1. Existential-individuating 2. Universal-oceanic O. Object (for contextualized-format coding only) Other Modified physical (A) Modified social (B) Judgments imputed to others Nonsense responses Immediate situation

TST Data
On the TST, measures were obtained for the full form as well as for the five responses chosen as being most important to one's self-concept. Results of these latter, top five responses were similar to those of the full form, with most of the observed cultural differences being slightly exaggerated. The A-B-C-D category frequencies based on these top five TST responses are shown in Table 2 and form the basis for all TST results presented in the following paragraphs. Japanese college women scored significantly higher (p < .01) on qualified attributes (C4) on the contextualized format than did Japanese college men. Although of interest in its own right, this finding does not affect the significant cultural difference on this category, which would have been even greater had the Japanese sample been evenly divided between women and men.
2

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American subjects referred more frequently to pure psychological attributes (C5; e.g., "I am easygoing") than did Japanese subjects, (256) = 11.34, p < .001, who referred more to the physical self (A; e.g., "I am 167 cm tall"), t(256) = 2.18, p < .05; social categories (B; e.g., "I am in the gymnastics club"), t(256) = 6.06, p < .001; preference (Cl; e.g., "one who likes animals"), t(256) = 2.68, p < .01; wish (C2; e.g., "hoping to get a driver's license"), (256) = 2.91, p < .01, and regular activities (C3; e.g., "one who swims often"), (256) = 5.8, p < .001. These results are consistent with those of Bond and Tak-sing (1983). At the same time, however, Japanese described themselves in highly abstract, global terms significantly more often than did Americans. In particular, Japanese responses included more universal (D2) self-references (e.g., "a living form"), (256) = 4.84, p < .001. The number of existential, individuating (Dl) statements (e.g., "myself") among Japanese was equivalent to that of American subjects.

Table 3 Culture X Questionnaire Univariate Analysis of Variance With Repeated Measures on Questionnaire
F value Type of statement (B) (Cl) (C2) (C3) (C4) (C5) Social Preference Wish Activity Qualified attribute Pure attribute Culture 40.08*** 1.31 0.18 12.24*** 19.68*** 19.67*** Questionnaire 82.53*** 3.96* 0.66 62.38*** 183.71*** 3.91 Culture X Questionnaire 25.37*** 38.42*** 17.02*** 6.89** 18.96*** 127.87***

Note. df= 1,256 for all values. *p<.05. **;?<.01. ***/><.001.

Contextualized Format Data

Results on the contextualized free-response format suggest a partial reversal of the TST results (see Table 2). This is most evident in the greater number of pure attributes (C5; e.g., "I am diligent") among Japanese over Americans, 2(267) = 4.25, p < .001. Qualified attributes (C4; e.g., "I am often lazy at home"), by contrast, were more frequent among Americans, (267) = 5.65, p < .001. In addition, American respondents referred significantly more often to preference (Cl), (267) = 6.78, p < .001, and to wish (C2), (267) = 2.89, p < .01, on the contextualized format than did Japanese. To examine the interaction of culture and type of free-response format (i.e., contextualized vs. noncontextualizedj underlying this reversal, I performed 2 x 2 (Culture X Questionnaire) analyses of variance (ANOVAS) with repeated measures on questionnaire (see Table 3). For pure attribute (C5) responses, analysis revealed a main effect for culture, and a significant Culture X Questionnaire interaction. In the case of qualified attributes (C4), I found significant main effects for culture and questionnaire, as well as a significant Culture X Questionnaire interaction. Among the remaining variables, significant main effects for culture were obtained for social (B) and activity (C3). Significant main effects for questionnaire were found for social (B), preference (Cl), and activity (C3). Finally, significant Culture X Questionnaire interactions were obtained for social (B), preference (Cl), wish (C2), and activity (C3). A powerful interaction of culture and questionnaire thus pervaded all relevant categories, strongly supporting the picture of a basic reversal of abstract-concrete trends in self-perception between the noncontextualized and contextualized formats, for both American and Japanese subjects.

Discussion Evaluation of Experiential and Cognitive Explanations

Although non-Western, Japan is a modern nation whose educational system has been recognized as a potential model for that of the United States (Rohlen, 1985; M. White, 1987). Accordingly, experiential explanations of concrete thought em-

phasizing lack of exposure to urbanization or schooling appear irrelevant. What is noteworthy is that, despite their living in a modern society, Japanese subjects in this study were more concrete than Americans on one measure of self-perception. It might be argued, as noted earlier, that the effects of modernization in fostering abstract thinking are not complete in Japan; still in transition, the Japanese are technologically but not yet cognitively modern, at least in some areas. Japan's cultural and institutional achievements, of course, make this a dubious idea. Yet one need not look beyond the present data to rule out an incomplete advance in social cognition. For, sideby-side the dearth of psychological attributes (C5) on Japanese TSTs, one finds universal (D2) responses at a rate significantly greater than that of American protocols. Such self-references as "an earthling" or "a child of Buddha" are further removed from the everyday, phenomenal realm than are psychological attributes. Scrutiny of the findings of Bond and Tak-sing (1983) reveals a similar result, apparently unnoticed by the authors. Citing significant cultural differences for five of the six categories of their TST coding scheme, Bond and Tak-sing inferred a tendency among Japanese to draw on "easily observed or readily accessible information about the self" (p. 162). The one category of their scheme in which Japanese showed no significant difference from Americans, however, was a category of abstract identifications, defined as "all noun-form self-references belonging neither to self nor to role" (e.g., "human being, creature, wanderer"; p. 158). Such equivalence in abstract self-descriptions between American and Japanese subjects stands at odds with the conclusions drawn by Bond and Tak-sing, while supporting the present study's findings. Results from the contextualized format also pose difficulties for a cognitive explanation. The prominence of pure attribute (C5) responses among Japanese compared with American subjects (Table 2) suggests that, contrary to conventional understandings of so-called nonabstractive, non-Western cultures, Japanese readily describe themselves in terms of psychological traits or dispositions, given an appropriate conceptual frame.

Impact of Cultural Meaning Systems on Self-Perception

The paradox of concrete trends in the absence of cognitive or experiential deficits thus leads to an alternative hypothesis: that

CULTURE AND SELF-PERCEPTION the perception of self is influenced by culture-specific idioms of personhood. How might individualistic and sociocentric premises explain the cultural reversal in abstract-concrete trends between these two questionnaires? Cultural interpretation of TST data. Lacking contextual cues, the TST formatas interpreted from an individualistic perspectiveconnotes situation-freedom, and lends itself to the expression of ego-autonomy. The pure psychological attributes of American respondents on the TST ("I am curious," "I am sincere") convey coherence and continuity of self apart from social role and appearance. They are emblems of the inner core of "character," which is the primary referent in social experience. From a sociocentric perspective, however, the question "Who am I?" standing alone, represents an unnatural sundering of person from social matrix and must therefore be supplemented with context. Japanese subjects on the TST thus tend to ground themselves in social affiliations (B; e.g., "a Keio student") or refer to relatively concrete attributes such as preferences (C1; e.g., "one who likes classical music") and activities (C3; e.g., "one who plays Mah-Jongg on Friday nights"). In contrast to the all-or-nothing effects of cognitive deficits, however, a sociocentric cultural idiom does not limit self-perception to concrete, observable details, because the human relatedness implicit to sociocentrism may be abstract as well: "I am a person of the twentieth century"; "I am humankind." This confirms an observation by Lebra (1976) that the reference group for Japanese belonging may be abstract or "symbolic" (p. 23), as with the sense of belonging to a historical period. Such universal (D2) statements on the TST, moreover, suggest a hiatus in Japanese self-percepts along the A-B-C-D concrete-abstract spectrum, as compared with the U.S. data (see Table 2). That is, Japanese responses on the TST are both significantly more abstract (universal D2), and significantly more concrete (e.g., social B, activity C3), than those of American subjects. If abstractness in person perception were simply a matter of the linear unfolding of cognitive skills over ontogenyskills common to Japanese and Americans alikeone would not expect to find such bipolarity in levels of abstraction in one culture as compared with another. A cultural rationale for these TST data is more compelling: Abstractions of a high order (e.g., "a human being") as well as of a low order (e.g., "a college student") express the Japanese self's identity and connectedness with the social world, whereas midlevel abstractions in the form of psychological attributes (e.g., "I am confident") serve to distinguish self as a situation-free actor, and are by comparison avoided. Abstract thinking in the perception of self, then, can be seen as coherent with and guided by cultural premises, facilitating a process in which self and other are culturally constituted rather than objectively discerned. Cultural interpretation of contextualized format. Just as the context-free TST lends itself to the expression of individualism, so the contextualized format is conducive to a sociocentric, relational idiom of the person. Situational cues make it unnecessary for Japanese subjects to fill in the context integral to their sense of self, providing the leeway for more abstract self-reflection. It is hereengaged in the familiar settings of daily life that Japanese are more likely to experience themselves as distinct agents with personal styles and dispositions: "studious,"

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"cheerful," "quiet," "whimsical," "boastful." Such psychological attributes differ from those of American subjects on the TST, however, in that the attendant processes of abstraction cover the breadth of experience in a given context only. For a self whose primary locus is the interpersonal nexus rather than the independent ego, abstracting behavior across contexts is much less important than abstracting behavior within a given setting. By contrast, American subjects responded to contextual cues with a more concrete interpretation of self. How might individualistic premises lead to this? Whereas the TST encourages the use of trait terms connoting the noncontingent, singular "I," contextual stipulations such as "at school" or "at home" are inconsistent with, and tend to undo, this connotation of situation-freedom. For American subjects, then, trait terms lose some of their meaning on the contextualized format. One result is that American subjects turn to more readily accessible information about the self, such as preferences (Cl) or activities (C3), or refer to other people or things apart from self (O). When psychological attributes are mentioned, they tend to be tagged with some form of contextual qualification, as if to show that the "I" is greater than and not to be confused with dispositions in a given setting. Given the task of defining oneself "at home," for instance, the individualistic self may say, "I am usually open with my brother" the unstated message being "But this is not necessarily the way I am elsewhere" By highlighting the situation-boundedness of the trait description, then, qualifications preserve the situation-freedom normally implicit in such terms. The Western ideal of a self unfettered by social ties is aptly described by Plath (1980): We enter society out of concession to animal weakness and practical need. But social participation can only diminish us; our highest self is realized in peak experiences that take us out of the ruck of society. Our cultural nightmare is that the individual throb of growth will be sucked dry in slavish social conformity. All life long, our central struggle is to defend the individual from the collective, (p. 216) American subjects' trend toward greater concreteness on the contextualized format reflects the difficulty of expressing a context-free self where context is already assumed.

Interactionism as a Western Model of Behavior as Distinct From a Non-Western Cultural Ethos

Might not all the references to context by American subjects on the contextualized formatto other people, to time, to specific locationsbe proof of some sort of sociocentrism? Is not the American self too an interactional self-in-society? Indeed, research strongly supports the interaction of person and situation in the behavior of Western subjects (Bowers, 1973; Endler & Magnusson, 1976). Interactionism as a theoretical model, however, must be distinguished from sociocentrism as a cultural ethos. Broadly defined, interactionismwith its emphasis on the social genesis of self and the constructive role of perceptionmay accommodate either individualistic or sociocentric cultural premises. This in turn implies that the very units of interactionperson and situationare constituted in different ways by different cultures. For this reason, it is not enough to define the Japanese self as

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interactionist in the Meadian (1934) sense, as some observers of Japan have recently done (e.g., Smith, 1985). The issue is not interaction per se, but rather the divergent cultural content, including concepts of the person, that motivate and give meaning to this interaction. When a Japanese college student describes herself as being shy at school, her referent is not an isolated ego but a self-in-human-nexus vivified in characteristic ways in the school setting; when her American counterpart says that at school she is "sometimes shy with my teachers," she is objectifying herself as an independent actor for whom school is background. In both cases there is interaction, but the nature of the interaction is culturally contingent. Perhaps not surprisingly, cross-cultural studies of variance in social behavior have found that, in Japan, the situation accounts for more variance than does the person (e.g., Argyle, Shimoda, & Little, 1978). The setting of school, for instance, is seen to exert more influence on behavior among Japanese than does an enduring trait of shyness. Yet such a finding assumes a split between situation and selfbetween school and shynessthat is not a part of Japanese culture.
Individuality Versus Individualism

mous agents whose actions and feelings exist apart from everyday social settings and engagement with others. Abstract processes in the perception of self occur in both cultures, but serve different ends: different, though equally valid, experiences of being a person. References
Argyle, M., Shimoda, K., & Little, B. (1978). Variance due to persons and situations in England and Japan. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 17, 335-337. Bond, M. H., & Tak-sing, C. (1983). College students' spontaneous self concept: The effect of culture among respondents in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States. Journal oj'Cross-Cultural Psychology, 14, 153-171. Bowers, K. S. (1973). Situationism in psychology: An analysis and a critique. Psychological Review, 80, 307-336. Brown, C. M., & Ferguson, L. W. (1968). Self concept and religious belief. Psychological Reports, 22, 266. Cole, M., Sharp, D., & Lave, C. (1976). The cognitive consequences of education: Some empirical evidence and theoretical misgivings. Urban Review, 9, 218-233. Dasen, P. R. (1972). Cross-cultural Piagetian research: A summary. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 3, 23-29. DeVos, G. A. (1973). Socialization for achievement: Essays on the cultural psychology of the Japanese. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edwards, W. (1987). The commercialized wedding as ritual: A window on social values. Journal of Japanese Studies, 13, 51-78. Endler, N.? & Magnusson, D. (1976). Toward an interactional psychology of personality. Psychological Bulletin, 83, 956-974. Fogelson, R. D. (1982). Person, self, and identity: Some anthropological retrospects, circumspects, and prospects. In B. Lee (Ed.), Psychosocial theories of the self (pp. 67-109). NewVbrk: Plenum Press. Gaines, A. D. (1984). Cultural definitions, behavior and the person in American psychiatry. In A. J. Marsella & G. M. White (Eds.), Cultural conceptions of mental health and therapy (pp. 167-192). Boston: D. Reidel. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1975). On the nature of anthropological understanding. American Scientist, 63, 47-53. Gelman, R. (1978). Cognitive development. Annual Review of Psychology, 29, 297-332. Gelman, R., & Baillargeon, R. (1983). A review of some Piagetian concepts. In P. Mussen (Ed.), Manual of child psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 167-230). New York: Wiley. Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. New \brk: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, C. (1968). Self conceptions: Configurations of content. In C. Gordon & K. J. Gergen (Eds.), The self in social interaction (Vol. 1, pp. 115-136). New York: Wiley. Greenfield, P. M. (1972). Oral or written language: The consequences for cognitive development in Africa, the United States, and England. Language and Speech, 15, 169-178. Hallowell, A. I. (1955). Culture and experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hallpike, C. R. (1979). The foundations of primitive thought. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hamaguchi, E. (1985). A contextual model of the Japanese: Toward a methodological innovation in Japanese studies. Journal of Japanese Studies, 11, 289-321. Hamano, K.. (1987). Ki: A key concept for Japanese interpersonal relationships. Psychologia, 30, 101-112.

Some observers of non-Western cultures, including Japan, have linked concrete, situation-bound modes of perception to weak ego boundaries and an undifferentiated, submerged self. Context-dependence, in this view, is a matter of cognitive default: Deficits in abstract thinking limit self-awareness to awareness of social role and concrete behavior. Knowledge of one's individualityequated with context-independenceby means of cross-situational traits and dispositions is held accessible only to people of more advanced cognitive skills (e.g., Harter, 1983). Such a cognitive approach, however, confuses individuality with individualism. Individualism represents one possible concept of personhood particular to certain post-Enlightenment Western societies (cf. Hogan & Emler, 1978; Sampson, 1977). It is not a prerequisite of individuality, which, as Hallowell (1955) and others have shown, is a human universal. Clearly, the Japanese emphasis on roles and situations, as evidenced in this study, does suggest an absence of individualism by U.S. standards. This is due, however, not to a shortage of abstract skills, but to the constitutive effects of an alternative concept of the person, one privileging the immediacy of experience over its unitary, abstract features. In this light, one finds expressions of individuality among Japanese that might otherwise be overlooked. On the contextualized format, for instance, Japanese subjects make use of an array of attributive terms suggestive of individuality, but this is an individuality expressed within, rather than beyond, the provinces of social context. Compared with American subjects, Japanese are not led by the premises of individualism to extend the abstract processes giving rise to this individuality across different contexts, in order to build the internal province of an inviolate ego. This is not to say that Japanese lack context-free awareness of an inner self. The existential-individuating (Dl) responses on the TST (e.g., "me," "myself"), as well as universal identifications (D2; e.g., "human being"), amply reflect such awareness. Rather, Japanese are less concerned with asserting themselves, through abstract summaries of behavior, as autono-

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Received June 23,1987 Revision received January 19,1988 Accepted June 3, 1988