Psychology: Culture And The Self - Annotated Bibliography Example

Hong, Ying-Yi., Ip, Grace., Chiu, Chi-Yue., Morris, Michael W., and Menon, Tanya.  “Self Cultural Identity and Dynamic Construction of the Self: Collective Duties and Individual Rights in Chinese and American Cultures.”  In their study reported in this article, the authors examine the effects of cultural identity activation on Chinese and North Americans’ spontaneous self-concepts, using the dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. They specifically manipulate the salience of individual self (“I”), collective self (“we”), and cultural identity in order to make their conclusions.

Significantly, they conclude that “lay theories of social organization in a culture should be regarded as latent knowledge structures, which can be activated by cues in the environment. When cultural identity is activated, individuals coming from cultures with markedly different conceptions of social organization would form different spontaneous conceptions of the self.”Singles, Theodore M. and Brown, William. “Culture, Self, and Collectivist Communication; Linking Culture to Individual Behavior.

” This article by Singles and Brown offers a theoretical framework and corresponding methodology to connect the important variables at the culture level to the individual level and, ultimately, to the specific outcome variables. The authors maintain that if there should be an advancement in theory about culture’s influence on communication, it is important to examine how culture affects individual-level processes and how these processes affect communication. Therefore, the various discussions and the findings of this research have great implications with regard to the understanding of culture’s influence on communication and the relationship between culture and self.