Culture and Motivation:
What Motivates People to Act in the Ways That They Do?

Steven J. Heine
University of British Columbia

Abstract
Many motivations are fundamentally grounded within cultural meaning systems.  That is, people from different cultural contexts are engaged in different cultural practices, and are attuned to different norms and contingencies that shape their motivations.  Thus, people from different cultures should experience motivations that are divergent, sometimes in pronounced ways.  This chapter reviews the literature with respect to cultural variation in motivations for achievement, self-consistency, self-enhancement, self-improvement, personal control, and fitting in.  

	What motivates people to act in the ways that they do?  It is difficult to conceive of a more fundamental question in psychology.  Many key social psychological theories, regarding such topics as cognitive dissonance, conformity, agency, approach/avoidance, self-enhancement, and achievement, are grounded in an understanding of the forces that impel human behavior.  
	Although questions regarding motivation have been central to psychology since the earliest days of the field, it was not until recently that focused consideration was directed at the ways that culture might be implicated in human motivations.  At one level, it is not obvious that people from divergent cultures would be motivated differently.  After all, humans are all of the same species, and we should expect there to be a great deal of similarity in their motivations, regardless of their cultural background.  Indeed, there are a variety of key psychological motivations that are likely common across all human cultures.  For example, people everywhere want things that improve the quality of their lives, such as getting access to nice material rewards, having stimulating relationships, and earning the respect of their peers (for a review see Kenrick, Li, & Butner, 2003).  
	On the other hand, humans are unlike all other species in the extent to which they depend on cultural learning in order to survive (e.g., Tomasello, 1999).  Because of this, human motivations cannot be understood solely in terms of biological predispositions interacting with the constraints and affordances provided by their physical environments.  Rather, those biological predispositions are expressed in the context of particular cultural environments, which shapes the ways motivations are made manifest.  For example, the ways that people get access to material rewards, the kinds of relationships that they might find stimulating, and the ways by which they secure the respect of their peers, are not identical across all contexts.  They are rooted in people’s values, their beliefs about what can be easily accomplished, their expectations of the consequences that are associated with their actions, and the ways that they understand their behaviors – all of which are importantly shaped by cultural context.  In other words, human motivations are grounded in cultural meaning systems (Bruner, 1990; Shweder, 1990).  As such, we should expect motivations to be expressed differently across cultures to the extent that cultures vary in the ways that particular behaviors are rendered meaningful.  Below, I review the literature on recent efforts to investigate how cultures differ in the ways that motivations are shaped and expressed.
Religion and Achievement Motivation
One of the earliest cultural psychological theories regarding motivation, and perhaps the most profound, was proposed by a sociologist.  In 1904-5 Max Weber published a highly influential and controversial series of essays entitled “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”  Weber recognized a fundamental tenet of cultural psychology that, in contrast to most events in the natural world, human behavior is necessarily interwoven with meaning.  Events do not simply impinge themselves upon people, but it is people’s interpretation of what those events mean that motivates them to respond accordingly. 
 	Weber’s theory was developed and explored largely outside of a psychological context, however, specific psychological hypotheses have since been proposed and tested (e.g., McClelland, 1961; Sanchez-Burks, 2002).  Given its non-psychological roots, the theory may be somewhat unfamiliar to many psychologists and warrants some background description.  Weber was interested in the question of how the revolutionary doctrine of capitalism was able to emerge out of the traditional economies of the medieval era.  At the time that Weber published his ideas, the dominant theory in the social sciences was Marxism, which proposed that capitalism emerged as the result of structural changes in the economy.  Specifically, Marx maintained that as industries developed technologies that increased the productivity of workers, the surplus value of workers’ efforts accumulated and was reinvested into production.  Capitalism was thus seen to follow from industrialization, and, indeed, was viewed as an inevitable consequence of it.  In contrast to the economic determinism of Marxism, Weber viewed capitalism as the product of people deriving meaning from a particular cultural context.  He proposed that capitalism was built on the foundation of a number of cultural beliefs that emerged alongside the Protestant Reformation.
	Protestantism initially emerged as a reaction to some corruption in the medieval Catholic Church, but Weber maintained that it contained ideas that shaped much more than the spiritual lives of its followers.  One idea to emerge from Protestantism was the notion that individuals were able to communicate with God directly, and were not dependent upon the Church as an intermediary.  This individualized relation between each person and God has been argued to be central to the blossoming of individualism that emerged during the Reformation, and continues to influence much of Western society today (e.g., Baumeister, 1987; McClelland, 1961).    
	A second idea to emerge was related to this belief in an individualized relation between God and each person.  Martin Luther proposed that each individual had a “calling,” that is, each person had a unique God-given purpose to fulfill during their mortal existence.  The idea was that people are all God’s servants in the world, and that each individual was given a specific duty or job to take care of while he or she tended the planet.  God gave each person unique skills and capabilities to enable them to fulfill their calling, and it was incumbent upon individuals to discover what their calling was.  The highest moral duty that people were believed to have was to serve God well by working hard at their calling.  Weber argued that by developing this notion of a calling Luther was able to imbue daily labor with a spiritual significance that had traditionally been reserved for religious activities such as prayer and ritual.  With the Protestant Reformation, work had thus become a moral obligation rather than something necessary for subsistence.  As such, people’s attitudes shifted from work as a means to survive to work as an inherently meaningful activity in itself.  This was a shift in attitudes that Weber maintains had an enormous impact on the economic development of Protestant nations.  
	The early Puritan sects of Protestantism (e.g.,  Calvinism, Methodism, Pietism, and Baptism) also proposed the radical idea of predestination: that is, the belief that it was already determined before one was born whether one was of the fortunate “Elect” who was destined for Heaven, or was one of the wretched many who was doomed to burn in Hell forever.  Which fate was one’s own was a distinction that no doubt mattered a great deal to the Puritans.  Weber submitted the counterintuitive proposition that this belief in predestination played a key role in the development of capitalism.  One might expect that if people’s fates were predetermined that they might respond by deciding to enjoy their lives, because there wasn’t anything that they could do to change their fates.  They might as well live it up while the living was good.  However, this interpretation was apparently rarely seized upon.  Rather, the notion of predestination brought with it “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness,” (Weber, 1904/1992, p. 104), and individuals were highly motivated to escape it by convincing themselves that they were one of the privileged Elect.  Because no one knew for certain what their fate was, they had to make inferences based on available cues.  The primary cue that one was of the Elect was that one possessed absolute certainty about this fact, and evidence for this certainty could be seen in the products of their efforts to fulfill their calling.  It was believed that God would not reward those who were doomed to burn in hell, so any sign of material success was perceived as evidence that one was of the Elect.  Furthermore, because one’s time on earth was to be spent serving God through one’s calling, rather than enjoying the fruits of one’s labor, any accumulated wealth was to be reinvested to further one’s efforts, and to accumulate even more wealth and evidence of one’s chosen status.  Modern capitalism, as Weber viewed it, was thus concerned with the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and not for the sake of the material pleasures that it brought.  Weber proposed that it was the combination of beliefs in an individualized relation with God, a calling, and predestination, that provided the cultural foundation for capitalism.  
	Weber’s thesis has been highly controversial since it was first published.  Giddens (1992) describes the many ways that people were offended by this theory: Weber’s characterizations of Catholicism as having a retarding influence upon modern economic development alienated most Catholics; his description of Puritan life as being bound up in an ecclesiastical strait-jacket was not appreciated by Protestants; people of other religious backgrounds felt ignored (there is clear evidence of a moralized work ethic among people of Confucian and Jewish backgrounds, for example, something which Weber emphasized in some of his other works; Weber, 1951, 1952); and Weber’s contention that religious ideas can transform economies perturbed the Marxists and most economists.  It seems that some were so incensed by Weber’s thesis that they were willing to offer some rather far-fetched alternative accounts for the greater economic success that Weber identified among Protestants compared with Catholics.  For example, Huntington (1915) argued that the relative success of Protestant nations was due to their more temperate climate (with no account offered for the relative lack of success among the more temperate Catholic nations).  Fanfani (1935) went so far as to propose, without any supporting data, that people in Protestant nations tend to have longer heads than people in Catholic ones, which somehow allowed for Protestants to be more successful.   
	Despite the continuing controversy, there is much evidence that is consistent with Weber’s thesis.  Some evidence comes from economists and historians who note that power and wealth moved in Europe from places like Spain and northern Italy before the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, to Northern European Protestant centers in Germany, Scandinavia, and England, until it’s most colossal bloom in the 20th century US (e.g., Landes, 1999).  A consideration of per capita income among countries of the world found that nations that were largely Protestant earned more than those that were mixed Protestant and Catholic, and that these earned more than those nations that were predominantly Catholic (Furnham, 1990).  Jackson, Fox, and Crockett (1970) found that Protestants in the US were more likely to enter high status non-manual occupations than Catholics of the same occupational origin, controlling for a variety of other societal variables.  McClelland (1961) found that Protestant nations were far more industrialized than their Catholic counterparts.  
	There is also much psychological evidence that supports Weber’s thesis.  McClelland (1961) recognized that Weber’s proposal was inherently a theory about motivation, and that one could derive testable hypotheses regarding a greater need for achievement among those raised Protestant than those raised Catholic.  For example, he found that Protestant parents expected their children to become self-reliant at an earlier age compared with Catholic parents.  Likewise, he compared the stories written by young boys and found that those written by German Protestants had higher need for achievement scores than those written by German Catholics (McClelland, 1961).  Various other lines of research have followed McClelland’s pioneering efforts.  Giorgi and Marsh (1990) found pronounced differences in the embracing of an intrinsic work ethic between Western European Catholics and mainstream Protestants (interestingly, the relation was clear both by contrasting individuals of different religions within countries, and by comparing countries) as evident in a measure of work values.  Furthermore, this relation was identifiable regardless of individual’s level of religiosity, suggesting that the work ethic has become secularized.  The Protestant ethic has also been associated with negative attitudes towards laziness and being overweight (Quinn & Crocker, 1999), and a concern with self-esteem and self-deception (which I elaborate on later; Baumeister, 1987; Crocker & Park, 2004).  
	Recently, Sanchez-Burks and colleagues (Sanchez-Burks, 2002; Sanchez-Burks, Lee, & Choi, Zhao, & Koo, 2003; Sanchez-Burks, Nisbett, & Ybarra, 2000) have investigated Weber’s thesis in the laboratory.  Sanchez-Burks (2002) was interested in exploring an aspect of Protestant ideology that was emphasized by Calvinism: that is, when Protestants are engaged in their morally-sanctioned work, they should be entirely focused on their work and thus maintain a rather impassive attitude towards potential distractions, such as other people (Bendix, 1977; Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, 1993).  That is, Protestants should maintain a relational style towards others that is relatively detached while they are working, however, in contexts where there are no work obligations, they should switch back into a more attentive relational style (Weber, 1947).  Sanchez-Burks (2002) sought to test this hypothesis by comparing Protestants and non-Protestants in two different settings.  The participants in his experiment were all European-American students raised either as Protestants (specifically Presbyterians and Methodists, the two Protestant sects influenced by Calvinist ideology that were most represented among the student body) or as non-Protestants (Catholics, atheists, and other religious backgrounds).  These participants were assigned to either engage in a task in a work environment or in a casual non-work setting.  Participants in the two conditions worked together with a confederate of the experimenter who was kept blind to the participants’ religious background.  The confederates were instructed to nervously shake their feet the entire time that they were talking with the participants.  The primary dependent variable was a measure of unconscious mimicry (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Chartrand & Bargh, 1999): specifically, how much more the participants shook their own feet when they were with the confederates compared with another time when they were alone.  Male participants revealed a pattern precisely in line with predictions derived from Weber’s thesis (women, Sanchez-Burks argued, tend to maintain more of a relational focus regardless of circumstance).  That is, male non-Protestants were just as likely to mimic the confederate’s foot-shaking in a casual setting as they were in a work setting.  In stark contrast, the Protestant males showed very little evidence of mimicry in the work setting, but showed considerable mimicry in the casual setting.  It appears that when Protestant males are focused on a work task they are able to shut out relational concerns, something which neither Protestant women or non-Protestants seem to do.  When Protestant men are actually working they do not seem to have much interest in anything else.
	Fuelling the controversy in Weber’s thesis, however, are some cross-cultural studies that compare Likert scale means on various self-report measures of the Protestant Work Ethic that do not appear to be consistent with Weber’s thesis.  Indeed, studies that have compared the means on these scales reveal either no cultural difference in the Protestant Work Ethic, or a weaker work ethic among nations of a largely Protestant background (e.g., the US, Australia, and Britain), than among people from countries with little exposure to Protestant ideology (e.g., India, Malaysia, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Zimbabwe (e.g., Baguma & Furnham, 1993; Furnham, Bond, & Heaven, 1993; Furnham & Muhiudeen, 1984; Isonio & Garza, 1987; Niles, 1994).  That is, the evidence for an association between Protestantism and achievement motivation is far more consistent in laboratory studies (e.g., Sanchez-Burks, 2002), and studies that measure various cultural products associated with the Protestant Work Ethic (e.g., McClelland, 1961), than it is in studies that utilize cross-cultural comparisons of means from self-report measures.  This is consistent with a growing body of evidence that comparisons of means of subjective Likert scale measures across cultures can be compromised by various response artifacts such as reference-group effects and yield results of dubious validity (Heine et al., 2001b; Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002; Peng, Nisbett, & Wong, 1997).  
	In sum, to the extent that Max Weber was correct a century ago, we can understand some of people’s achievement motivations to be derived from religious ideas that they encounter in their cultures.  Weber’s thesis remains controversial, however, a great deal of evidence in support of it has been marshaled from a variety of different disciplines.  Laboratory investigations of Protestant ideology are relatively new to psychology, and there will surely be further challenges and validations of Weber’s thesis in the future.
Motivations for Consistency
	One of the most central themes in Western social psychology derives from the notion that people are motivated to be consistent.  Dating back to Heider (1958) and Festinger (1957), researchers have emphasized the importance that people place on viewing themselves and their behaviors in a way that coheres in a consistent and sensible manner.  This motivation can be identified in a number of diverse research paradigms, including cognitive dissonance, self-verification theory, autobiographical memories, the “foot-in-the-door” paradigm, and is a fundamental assumption underlying personality theory (Mischel, 1973).  When people encounter inconsistency, so the theorizing goes, they encounter a problem that needs to be rectified.  As the 2004 US presidential election highlighted, it was a costly liability for John Kerry to be perceived as someone who changed his opinions in contrast to the determined and steadfast George W. Bush.  Consistency is a desired endstate that people are motivated to achieve.
	Although the Western research on consistency demonstrates that a motivation for consistency is an extremely powerful drive, it is less clear how well this motivation generalizes to other cultural contexts.  In particular, there is a growing body of evidence that consistency motivations are weaker among East Asians.  For example, consider the results of a study by Kanagawa, Cross, and Markus (2001).  They sought to investigate how much the context that people are in affects the ways that they view themselves.  College students from Japan and the US were asked to complete the Twenty-Statements Test, however, the context that they were in at the time of the study was varied.  Some participants completed the questionnaire in a professor’s office, other participants sat next to a fellow student, others sat in a large group that consisted of about 20-50 people, and others completed the questionnaire alone.  Kanagawa et al calculated the ratio of positive statements that students made about themselves compared to the number of negative statements.  They found that the American responses looked quite similar across the four conditions.  Their selves were described in pretty much the same way regardless of situation.  In contrast, the Japanese responses varied considerably across situation.  They were considerably less self-critical when they were by themselves than when they were with others, especially when they were with a professor.  The general positivity of Japanese individuals’ attitudes towards themselves appears quite differently depending on who is in the room with them.  Likewise, other research with the Twenty Statements Test reveals that East Asians tended not to describe themselves by abstracting features across situations, in contrast to American tendencies to view themselves more in terms of pure psychological attributes (Bond & Cheung, 1983; Cousins, 1991).  East Asians thus appear to be more willing than Westerners to describe themselves in divergent ways across different contexts (also see Suh, 2002).  
	One reason why East Asians appear to be more accepting of inconsistency can be traced to a predilection for what Peng and Nisbett (1999) referred to as “naïve dialecticism.”  In contrast to Western formal reasoning traditions that require that contradictions be resolved, principles of Chinese reasoning recognize contradiction as natural and something to be accepted.  When presented with two apparently contradictory arguments Westerners appear to accept just one of them, whereas Chinese accept the merits of both (Peng & Nisbett, 1999).  This tolerance for contradiction among East Asians generalizes to their self-concepts.  Spencer-Rodgers, Peng, Wang, and Hou (2004) found that East Asians are more likely to have ambivalent views of themselves than Westerners, agreeing with statements about themselves that would appear to be in contradiction.  These contradictory views also generalize to East Asians’ personality traits, implicit theories, and attitudes (Hamamura & Heine, 2004; Spencer-Rodgers, Boucher, Mori, Wang, & Peng, 2005).  Furthermore, when East Asians encounter new contradictory information about themselves they were more likely to accept it, and adjust their self-views compared to Americans (Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2005).  In sum, inconsistent beliefs are tolerated more among East Asians than among Westerners.
	This cultural difference in a motivation for consistency is not isolated to how people describe themselves and their beliefs.  Indeed, social psychology’s favorite theory, cognitive dissonance, also reveals pronounced cultural variation.  Heine and Lehman (1997) found that whereas North Americans show pronounced dissonance reduction strategies, Japanese showed no tendency to rationalize their decisions after they made them, even when they were confronted with other threatening feedback.  This absence of a motivation for dissonance among East Asians in standard dissonance paradigms appears to be reliable (also see Hiniker, 1969; Hoshino-Browne et al., in press; Kitayama, Snibbe, & Markus, 2004).  However, East Asians do appear to show some interesting variants on the dissonance reduction process.  Hoshino-Browne et al (in press) found that although East Asians did not rationalize their own decisions, they would rationalize the decisions that they made for other people.  Kitayama et al (2004) found that even though Japanese would not rationalize their decisions in a standard dissonance condition, they showed pronounced dissonance when placed in a subtly activated interpersonal context.  It appears that motivations for consistency among East Asians emerge in rather different forms than they do for Westerners.  Whereas North Americans appear to aspire for consistency within themselves, East Asians are concerned with being consistent with their behavior in the context of others (also see Cialdini, Wosinska, & Barrett, 1999, for comparable cultural differences between Americans and Poles).  Hence, there is a similarity across cultures in motivations to keep something consistent, however, what people endeavor to keep consistent varies importantly across cultures.  
	As much research has demonstrated, then, North Americans are motivated to be consistent across situations.  In general, it is often a useful starting point to assume that traits and practices become common within a culture because they are functional (although there are many clear instances of maladaptive cultural traits and practices; see Richerson & Boyd, 2005). To the extent that the consistency of self-views serves a function, we should expect that consistency has more favorable outcomes for North Americans than for East Asians.  
	Suh (2002) tested this hypothesis by exploring the correlates of self-consistency among Koreans and Americans.  He found that, for Americans, there were strong positive correlations between consistency and subjective well-being, peer-rated likability and evaluations of social skills.  Apparently, Americans feel better about themselves if they see themselves as consistent, and other people view consistent individuals to be especially socially skilled and likable.  In contrast, the correlations with the Koreans were much smaller.  Being consistent in Korea was not associated as strongly with feeling good about oneself (see Campbell et al., 1996 for similar findings with Japanese), and it was not as associated with being perceived as especially socially skilled or likable.  Koreans are likely less consistent across situations compared with Americans because there are fewer benefits in Korea for viewing oneself consistently in this way.  The benefits of self-consistency do not appear to be constant across cultures.
Motivations for Self-Enhancement and Self-Esteem
	The motivation that has probably been researched the most across cultures is the motivation to self-enhance, that is, a desire to view oneself positively.  A great deal of research, from a diverse array of methodologies, reveals that Westerners apparently have a strong need to view themselves in positive terms. For example, measures of self-esteem find that the vast majority of North Americans score in the top half of their scale (Baumeister, Tice, & Hutton, 1989).  Indeed, individuals with low self-esteem, operationalized as those with scores below the theoretical midpoint of the scale are relatively rare in North American cultural contexts (less than 7 % of a large European-Canadian sample; Heine & Lehman, 2004). In addition, evidence for the positivity of Westerner’s self-views can be seen in the common finding that people will often exaggerate the positivity of their evaluations: that is, they show self-enhancing biases.  Reviews of this literature (e.g., Greenwald, 1980; Miller & Ross, 1975; Taylor & Brown, 1988) indicate that North American’s self-perceptions tend to be systematically biased toward an overly positive view of the self.  Moreover, the ever-growing body of research on self-evaluation maintenance provides further testimony to the strong motivations that Westerners have for positive self-views.  This literature documents the variety of compensatory self-protective responses that are elicited when people encounter threats to their self-esteem.  Such strategies include: self-evaluation maintenance (e.g., Tesser, 1988), self-affirmation (e.g., Steele, 1988), compensatory self-enhancement (e.g., Baumeister & Jones, 1978), downward social comparison (e.g., Wills, 1981), motivated reasoning (e.g., Kunda, 1990), and self-handicapping (e.g., Tice, 1991).  That such a wide variety of self-esteem maintenance tactics exists highlights the importance of maintaining a positive self-evaluation, at least within North American culture where the majority of this research has been conducted.
	This research reveals quite clearly that motivations for positive self-views are powerful and pervasive among Westerners.  However, given that Westerners tend to endorse more independent views of self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991a), and that much research has identified a pronounced positive relationship between independent self-construals and positive self-views within a variety of different cultures (correlations range between .33 and .51; e.g., Heine, 2003; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002; Singelis, Bond, Lai, & Sharkey, 1999), raises the possibility that such positive self-views will be more elusive in cultural contexts that are less characterized by independence.
	Much research has investigated motivations for positive self-views in more collectivistic cultures, particularly in East Asian cultures.  Overall, the evidence suggests that these motivations are far weaker among East Asians.  For example, East Asians score significantly lower than Westerners on various different measures of self-esteem (e.g., Chan, 2000; Feather & McKee, 1993; Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2004), and show less evidence for a diverse array of self-enhancing biases (e.g., Heine & Lehman, 1995; Heine & Renshaw, 2002; Kurman, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991b; Norasakkunkit & Kalick, 2002).  Evidence for a variety of self-evaluation maintenance strategies are also weaker among East Asians (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 2001a; Heine et al., 2001b; White & Lehman, 2005). These cultural differences in self-enhancing motivations emerge remarkably consistently and are highly pronounced.  Heine and Hamamura (2005) recently conducted a meta-analysis of self-enhancing tendencies among Westerners and East Asians and found significant cultural differences in every study for 30 of the 31 methodologies that were used (the one exception being comparisons of self-esteem using the Implicit Associations Test; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Kitayama & Uchida, 2003).  The average effect size for the cultural differences across all studies was d = .84.  Furthermore, whereas the average effect size for self-enhancing motivations was large (d = .86) within the Western samples, these motivations were largely absent among the East Asian samples (d = -.02) with Asian-Americans falling in between (d = .33).  Apparently, East Asians possess little motivation to self-enhance (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999). 
	However, it is possible that East Asians really are just as motivated as Westerners to evaluate themselves positively, but that there are various Western biases in the research methodologies that have been employed that have prevented researchers from reliably identifying these motivations.  For example, one possibility is that East Asians are more motivated to enhance their group selves rather than their individual selves, and comparisons of people’s individual self-enhancing tendencies thus obscure their group self-enhancing motivations.  The reasoning behind this alternative hypothesis appears compelling, however, many studies find that Westerners show stronger motivations than East Asians to enhance their group selves as well (e.g., Heine, 2003; Snibbe, Markus, Kitayama, & Suzuki, 2003), which challenges this account.  Another possibility is that East Asians value a different set of traits than what has been explored in research thus far, and if they were asked to evaluate themselves on traits that they viewed to be especially important the cultural differences would be reduced.  Although some evidence is in support of this alternative account using the “Better-than-Average Effect” paradigm (e.g., Brown & Kobayashi, 2002), other methodologies reveal that East Asians are more self-critical for especially important traits (e.g., Heine & Lehman, 1999; Heine et al., 2001b; Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997).  Moreover, when a cognitive bias (the “Everybody is Better than Their Group’s Average Effect”; Klar & Giladi, 1997) is controlled for in the “Better-than-Average Effect” paradigm, the relation between trait importance and self-enhancement is no longer evident among East Asians (see Heine & Hamamura, 2005), suggesting that this observed relation is largely a cognitive bias, as opposed to evidence of self-enhancement.  A last alternative account to consider is that East Asians are just feigning modesty in these studies (and perhaps Westerners are feigning their bravado; see Kurman, 2003; Suzuki &Yamagishi, 2004), and that their private self-feelings are just as positive as they are for Westerners.  However, that these cultural differences are at least as pronounced in anonymous situations that employ hidden behavioral measures (e.g., Takata, 2003; Heine et al., 2001b), renders this account less plausible.  One piece of evidence that is in support of this alternative account is the lack of cultural differences found with the Implicit Associations Test measure of implicit self-esteem  (e.g., Kitayama & Uchida, 2003).  Although it is not yet clear what implicit self-esteem indicates, I would suggest that it likely taps into an affective feeling towards the self, and that East Asians and Westerners “like” themselves to a comparable extent.  Overall, the research provides converging evidence that East Asians do not have as strong a desire as Westerners to view themselves positively.
	One question to consider is how might this cultural difference in self-enhancement emerge?  A proximal answer could be that these motivations are learned from experiences that individuals have while they are young.  One source of evidence in support of this comes from a study by Miller and colleagues (Miller, Wang, Sandel, & Cho, 2002; Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997), in which parents in Taiwan and the US were interviewed regarding their attitudes towards child-rearing.  The researchers found that the stories that were more often told by European-American parents to their children were ones that focused on a past success of the child.  In stark contrast, the Taiwanese parents were more likely to tell stories about past transgressions of the child (Miller et al., 1997).  When researchers explicitly asked parents what they thought about self-esteem they received highly divergent answers between the two groups (Miller et al., 2002).  The European-American parents viewed self-esteem as central to child-rearing and saw it as a positive quality that enhanced children’s development, and something that should be cultivated by parents.  The Taiwanese parents, in contrast, had little to say about the words that most closely approximated self-esteem (it’s perhaps telling that there is no direct translation of self-esteem in East Asian languages), and what they did have to say about it was often somewhat negative; for example, expressing the belief that too much self-esteem could lead to frustration when things weren’t working out well for the children.  Similar to this cultural difference in children’s experiences with their families, North American schools are more likely than their East Asian counterparts to make efforts to inculcate self-esteem (e.g.,  Lewis, 1995; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992).  In sum, cultural environments in North America and East Asia provide different opportunities for learning ideas regarding whether positive self-views are desirable or not.
	However, a more distal answer to the question of the origins of cultural differences is also needed, as the above does not address how parents and schools in the different cultures came to get their respective views.  One way to consider how cultures came to differ in their predilections for self-enhancement is to look at the emergence of motivations for positive self-views over history.  Baumeister (1987) explored Western literature across the centuries, and submitted that the notion of individual selves was not evident in the texts until the 12th century, when the Christian concept of the last judgment changed from being an issue of salvation of collectives to the salvation of individual souls. It was not until the 16th century and the birth of the Protestant Revolution, however, that something akin to self-enhancing motivations first became clearly evident in literature.  The Calvinist doctrine of predestination burdened people with a great deal of psychic anxiety at not knowing whether they would, at any given instance, be killed and then be doomed to spend the rest of eternity burning in hell.  With such an enormous, and ultimately unknowable, threat lurking in the back of their minds, people were motivated to grasp at any shred of evidence that suggested that they might be of the elect, and motivations for self-deception and self-enhancement grew accordingly (Pye, 2000; Weintraub, 1978).  
	More recently, there is evidence for growing motivations for self-enhancement within the US.  Twenge and Campbell (2001) conducted a meta-analysis of studies that measured self-esteem among American college students using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965).  Over a 30 year period college students’ self-esteem consistently rose to the point that participants in the most recent studies had self-esteem scores that were larger than those in the earlier studies by an effect size of approximately d = .6.  Given the relation between independent self-views and self-esteem, discussed earlier, this might be further evidence that the US has becoming more individualistic since the end of the second world war (e.g., Putnam, 2000; Rosen, 1998).  Historical research is relatively new to psychology, and much remains unknown about the reasons underlying changes in self-enhancement motivations over time, however, this is an important avenue to explore for coming to understand the origin of cultural differences.  
Motivations for Face and Self-Improvement
	Another way to address the question of why motivations for positive self-views vary across cultures is to consider the different kinds of positive views that one might desire.  One way of having a positive self-view is to have high self-esteem.  That is, the individual views him or herself positively.  Another way of having a positive self-view is to have a good deal of “face.”  Face is an interesting concept that is of considerable importance in much of the world, although it receives much less attention among Westerners.  Indeed, the expression to “lose face,” didn’t enter the English language until the late 19th century as a direct translation from Chinese (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989).  Face has been defined as the amount of social value that others grant you if you live up to the standards associated with your position (e.g., Ho, 1976).  In hierarchical collectivist societies, such as the kinds found in East Asia, face takes on special importance (Chang & Holt, 1994).  What is prioritized is not how positively people think of themselves, but whether significant others think they are doing well.  If others grant an individual face, they will enjoy all the benefits that come with the enhanced status and power.  In such a cultural context, people can become highly motivated to maintain and enhance their face (Heine, 2005).  
	An important characteristic of face is that it’s more easily lost than it is gained.  Because the amount of face that people have access to is determined by their position, they can’t readily increase their face unless they are promoted to a higher position.  This renders face as something that is difficult to enhance.  However, face is lost whenever an individual is perceived to fail to live up to the standards of their role (Ho, 1976).  It is thus always vulnerable in public situations, and because others determine one’s face, one must count on the good will of others to be able to maintain their face.  Given that face is so easily lost, it seems that a good strategy for people to take would be to adopt a very cautious approach and try to ensure that they are not acting in a way that might lead others to reject them (Heine, 2005).  If one can attend to any potential weaknesses, and work towards correcting them by improving themselves, they should decrease the chance that others will view them as having lost face (Heine et al., 2001b).
	This kind of defensive, cautious approach to not losing a resource is consistent with a prevention focus, that is, an orientation towards avoiding negative outcomes.  This is in contrast to a concern with enhancing the positivity of one’s self-view, which is consistent with a promotion focus, that is, a concern with achieving positive outcomes (Higgins, 1996).  If a concern with face leads to a prevention orientation, and East Asians are more concerned with face, then we should expect to see greater evidence of prevention orientations among them.  Much research has confirmed this pattern (e.g., Elliot, Chirkov, Kim, & Sheldon, 2001; Ip & Chiu, 2002; Lockwood, Marshall, & Sadler, 2005).  For example, Lee, Aaker, and Gardner (2000) asked Hong Kong Chinese and Americans to rate how important some tennis games were.  The Chinese saw the games that were framed as opportunities to avoid a loss as more important than those framed as opportunities to win, and the Americans showed the opposite pattern.  
	If one has a promotion focus, one should focus one’s efforts on things that one is good at because these will provide more opportunities for success.  Things that one is not good at, in contrast, should be avoided, because they are not likely to lead to success.  In contrast, if one has a prevention focus one should focus one’s efforts on things that one is bad at because correcting one’s shortcomings will help one to avoid future failures.  This suggests that East Asians should respond quite differently to successes and failures than Westerners.  Heine et al. (2001b) had Japanese and Canadian participants come into the laboratory where they received private feedback that they had done poorly on a creativity test.  The participants were left alone in a room with another set of creativity items and were timed for how long they persisted on this task.  The Canadians persisted significantly longer after success than failure, a finding that replicates much work that has been done on persistence research in the West (e.g., Feather, 1966; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1983).  In stark contrast, the Japanese persisted significantly longer after failure than success.  Apparently, the Canadians were more interested in working on things that they were good at, as these were more likely to provide them with opportunities to view themselves positively.  The Japanese, in contrast were more interested in working on the things that they were bad at, apparently so that they could improve themselves, and be less likely to fail in the future.  This self-improvement motivation, a desire to seek out potential weaknesses and work on correcting them, is a strong motivation in East Asian contexts (e.g., Hoshino-Browne & Spencer, 2000; Kitayama et al., 1997).  Interestingly, this cultural difference has even been shown to influence people’s choice of leisure activities.  Oishi and Diener (2003) found that when given a choice to play either basketball or darts that European-Americans tend to choose the activity that they’re good at, whereas Asian-Americans do not.  Whether one is primarily concerned with focusing on positive aspects of the self, or focusing on areas of the self that need improving, will impact the kinds of choices that people make in their lives.
Agency and Control
	All organisms have needs and desires, and must work within the constraints and affordances of their environments towards achieving them.  Unlike other organisms, humans live in cultural environments, which has significant consequences for how they strive to achieve their needs and desires.  People have theories about how they can exert control within particular contexts, and those theories are importantly shaped by cultural learning.  People strive to achieve their needs and desires in ways that are consistent with their theories for exerting agency in specific ways.
	One theory that people possess which is relevant to their experiences of control is whether they perceive their selves to be easily malleable and changeable or stable and fixed.  Dweck and colleagues (Dweck, Hong, & Chiu, 1993; Dweck & Leggett, 1988) term these two implicit theories incremental and entity theories of self, respectively.  In addition to the implicit theories that people possess about the malleability of the self, they also have implicit theories about the malleability of the world.  For example, one can see the world as something that is fixed and beyond their control to change (an entity theory of the world), or one can think of the world as flexible and responsive to their efforts to change (an incremental theory of the world).  To the extent that people from different cultures perceive selves and their social worlds to be more or less fluid and malleable, they will possess different theories about how individuals can, should, and do act. 
	Su et al (1999) offer a nice metaphor to capture the potential ways that people’s selves and social worlds can be malleable: Imagine that someone is building a stone wall.  There are a couple of different approaches that they could attempt.  One is to emphasize the integrity of the wall at the expense of the individual stones.  That is, people could have a clear plan of the shape of the wall that they want to maintain, and they choose stones that were of approximately the correct size and they would then carve them down so that they fit perfectly into the wall.  The stones would change to accommodate the wall.  An alternative way to build the wall would be to allow the wall to take on the shape of the individual stones.  People could choose stones that were roughly of the right size and shape and they would assemble them into a wall.  The wall would change in shape to reflect the nature of the individual stones.  The enterprise of stone-wall building will vary a great deal depending on whether one views the individual stones or the resultant wall as flexible, and capable of being changed. 
	As in the above metaphor, there are occasions where there are clear social constraints that individuals must adjust themselves to, and there are occasions where social relationships and organizations will change to adjust themselves to the nature of their individual members.  Although it would seem to be the case that everyone must sometimes view their individual selves as more flexible than their social worlds, and sometimes would see their social worlds as more malleable than themselves, the extent to which these beliefs are embraced can vary importantly across cultures.
Primary and Secondary Control.  Rothbaum, Weisz, and Snyder (1982) proposed that there are at least two ways that people can gain control in their lives.  The first way they labeled “primary control.”  People achieve a sense of primary control by striving to shape existing realities to fit their perceptions, goals, or wishes.  This construct captures how most researchers studying control have operationalized it.  Rothbaum and colleagues proposed another kind of control that has been far less researched than primary control, which they labeled “secondary control.”  People achieve a sense of secondary control when they attempt to align themselves with existing realities, leaving the realities unchanged, but exerting control over their psychological impact.   
	Although everyone experiences primary and secondary control on occasion, cultures differ in the extent to which people engage in these two strategies.  In hierarchical collectivistic cultures, such as in East Asia, the social world remains somewhat impervious to efforts by a lone individual to change things (e.g., Chiu, Dweck, Tong, & Fu, 1997).  Power and agency tend to be concentrated in groups or is mandated by the role that an individual occupies, and thus there are many domains in which people are unable to exert much direct influence.  Likewise, East Asians are more likely to have a flexible and incremental view of themselves (Norenzayan, Choi, & Nisbett, 2002, although the evidence for this is more consistent with experimental manipulations and measures of concrete responses than with comparisons of means on Likert score measures, Heine et al., 2001b).  When the self is perceived to be more mutable than the social world, it follows that people would be quite willing to adjust themselves to better fit in with the demands of their social worlds.  
	In contrast, people from Western cultures tend to stress the malleability of the world relative to the self (Su et al., 1999).  God told Adam that he would have dominion over all the earth; the world was there for humans to change and use to their liking.  This belief persists in the West, and is manifest in the view that the individual has potential control of shaping the world to fit his or her own desires.  When people view individuals to be the center of experience and action, they accordingly look to individuals as a source of control.  Moreover, the independent self is experienced as relatively immutable and consistent (Heine et al., 2001b; Suh, 2002).   This view that the self is an immutable entity, working within the context of a mutable world, sustains a perception of primary control.  
	Weisz, Rothbaum, and Blackburn (1984) make the case that there are many socializing experiences in Japan that lead Japanese to be more comfortable with engaging in secondary control strategies.  For example, Japanese infants spend much more time in contact with their mothers and thus learn to adjust themselves to what their mothers are doing.  Japanese workers change jobs far less frequently than their Western counterparts, and it is not uncommon for workers to be promised lifetime employment – a system that ensures that the employee learns to adjust him or herself to whatever demands the company places on them.  Weisz and colleagues propose that these and other socialization 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.  
	One study that investigated whether control strategies differed between Japanese and Americans in line with the hypotheses of Weisz and colleagues was conducted by Morling, Kitayama, and Miyamoto (2002).  In one study, participants were asked to either list occasions when they had tried to influence people or objects that surrounded them (i.e., primary control experiences) or they had tried to adjust themselves to these people or objects (i.e., secondary control experiences).  Americans were better able to recall influencing situations than adjusting ones, whereas Japanese remembered more adjusting situations than influencing ones.  In this respect, the term “secondary control” might thus be somewhat of a misnomer in Japan as this type of control may be more common there than “primary control.”  Furthermore, although both Japanese and Americans evaluated influencing situations to have felt more powerful than adjusting ones, suggesting that primary control might universally be experienced as powerful, Japanese reported feeling more powerful about their adjusting situations than the Americans did.  This cultural difference was evident in the way that participants described their adjusting experiences.  For example, Americans were more likely than Japanese to report feeling that they were compelled to adjust, as though it was against their will.  They often described their experiences as something that they “had to do”, for example, “I had to adjust last school year when one of my roommates’ boyfriends moved into our house.”  In contrast, the Japanese situations rarely indicated that the individual felt compelled to adjust, or that the adjustment experience was negative.  In sum, experiences of primary control seem to be more frequent among people from Western than Eastern cultural background, and a variety of other studies have found comparable findings (e.g., Bond & Tornatzky, 1973; Chang, Chua, & Toh, 1997; Seginer, Trommsdorff, & Essau, 1993).
	Being part of a group can mean that an individual must sometimes go along with others as a means to get along well.  Secondary control strategies are effective ways to manage one’s successful functioning in group contexts.  However, if one spends a great deal of their time thinking about how they are members of groups, and of thinking of others in terms of the groups to which they belong, one might also come to think of control in a different way.  That is, one might start to perceive groups as agents, that is, as entities that can make decisions and exert control.  Do people in collectivistic cultures see groups as agents in similar ways that people in individualistic cultures see individuals as agents?
	This question was investigated by Menon, Morris, Chiu, and Hong (1999).  One way that they considered the role of group agency was to see how newspapers in different countries referred to the agents involved in scandals involving rogue traders.  For example, in 1995 the British stock trader Nick Leeson was convicted of fraud when he was involved in a scandal that resulted in the loss of over a billion dollars and the ultimate collapse of his employer, Baring’s Bank.  Menon and colleagues were interested in how newspapers in the US and Japan (specifically, the New York Times and Asahi Shinbun) reported on this, and various other rogue trader scandals that were in the news.  Did the reporters describe the problem as ultimately lying with the individual, such as Nick Leeson, or did they describe the problem as due to the management of the organization, such as Baring’s Bank?  The articles that were written about the scandals were analyzed with respect to the frequency with which the articles addressed the individuals involved or the organizations that employed them.  The New York Times was more likely to explore the scandals in terms of the problems with the individual trader.  In stark contrast, however, the Asahi Shinbun focused its reporting on the problems inherent in the organizations that could allow this scandal to occur.  Apparently, Japanese are more likely to see events in the world as occurring due to the behaviors and decisions of groups, whereas Americans tend to understand events in terms of the individuals involved.  Menon and colleagues further demonstrated how robust this cultural difference was by showing in another study that cultures differed not only in their explanations of human behaviors but also in the animal world as well.  They found that Americans were more prone to explain a rancher’s accident in terms of the behaviors of a rogue cow, whereas Chinese preferred to explain the same accident in terms of the unruly behaviors of the entire herd (although note that  Ishii & Kitayama, 2005 provide evidence for dispositional inferences for group behavior to be similar among Americans and East Asians).  The same event can be understood quite differently depending on one’s view of agency.
Making Choices.  One way that people can exercise control over their worlds is by making choices.  People make countless choices everyday and in doing so they structure their lives so that they match up to their desires.  Making choices are perhaps the most direct way that people engage in primary control strategies.
	Choice is something that is surely valued everywhere, however, the extent to which people value choice, and exercise it, is influenced by the contexts that they are in.  In individualistic societies people are less dependent on the actions of others than they are in collectivistic ones.  People in collectivistic societies should, on average, be more concerned with the goals of their groups, and, as such, be more willing to adjust their behaviors (and reduce their choices) so that they can coordinate the actions of the group towards those goals.  One stark example of this cultural difference is that in many collectivistic cultures today (and perhaps in nearly all cultures several centuries ago), critical life decisions such as who one would marry or what job one would pursue have been made by families rather than the individuals themselves (e.g., Lee & Stone, 1980).
	Iyengar and Lepper (1999) explored how children from different cultural backgrounds would respond to situations in which they made choices on their own or had the choices made by someone else.  Iyengar and Lepper recruited fifth grade students of European and Asian ancestry from two elementary schools in the San Francisco Bay area.  The students were randomly assigned to play a computerized math game in one of three different conditions.  In a “personal choice” condition the students were allowed to make a number of choices that were all irrelevant to their success in the game.  For example, they could choose which of four icons would represent their spaceship, and which of four names they would give to their spaceship.  In an “out-group choice” condition students saw the same four options for the spaceship icons and possible names, however, they were told that the choices had already been made for them by students from another school.  Last, students in an “in-group choice” condition were shown the same options and were told that they were assigned to a particular spaceship because that was what most of their classmates had wanted.  The students then all had the opportunity to play the game and their persistence was assessed.  The students of European background attempted the most games when they got to choose their own space-ships.  They played significantly fewer games when either the students from the other school or their classmates made their choices for them.  In contrast, the Asian-American students attempted the most games when their classmates chose their space-ships for them.  However, like the Euro-Americans, they were not very motivated when an outgroup member made their choices for them.  Apparently, Asian-Americans viewed the situation of their in-groups making choices for them as opportunities to promote harmony and a sense of belongingness with their other group-members.  Euro-Americans seemed to view the same situation as something that stripped them of their freedom to choose.  How people feel when close others make choices for them thus varies a great deal across cultures.
	There is also evidence of cultural variation in perceptions of control within individualistic cultures.  The vast majority of psychological research is conducted with a limited sample that is not only largely restricted to participants from Western cultural backgrounds, but is also usually further limited to college students from those same cultural backgrounds (Sears, 1986).  College students are not necessarily representative of humankind.  For example, they differ from the rest of the population in that they are more likely to be from upper middle-class backgrounds, and are more likely themselves to raise their own families in an upper middle-class environment, compared with non-college educated people. 
	How might we expect people of upper middle-class backgrounds to differ in their perceptions of control than those from working class backgrounds?  One obvious way is that working class folks earn less money, and have fewer choices available because of that.  Working class people also have different kinds of relationships compared with upper middle class people (they tend to have fewer friends, they live closer to them, they have more frequent contact with kin, and rely more on kin for material assistance; Allan, 1979; Markus, Ryff, Curhan, & Palmerscheim, in press).  Working class adults participate in a different cultural world compared with upper middle class adults, and they are more likely to face hardships in their lives, and have less control over these hardships, than do upper middle class adults.  
	Snibbe and Markus (2005) explored differences in control experiences by comparing working class and upper middle-class Americans.  In one of their studies, they asked people at a shopping mall to complete a questionnaire for which they were offered a pen as compensation.  In a “free choice” condition the experimenter let the participant choose any pen that they wanted.  In a “usurped choice” condition, the participant was allowed to choose a pen, however, after making their choice the experimenter said “I’m sorry.  You can’t have that pen.  It’s the last one of its kind that I have.  Here – take this one.”  The experimenter then replaced their chosen pen with the same kind of pen that the previous participant in the “free choice” condition had chosen.  At the end of the questionnaire the participants were asked to evaluate the pen that they had received.  The working class participants were almost as satisfied with the pen that they received in the usurped choice condition as they were in the free choice condition.  In contrast, however, the upper middle class participants were significantly less satisfied when their choice had been taken away from them.  Snibbe and Markus argue that upper middle class Americans are raised to favor choices, and to express themselves through their choices.  As such, they learn to respond quite negatively whenever they perceive that they do not have any choice in a situation.  In contrast, working class Americans grow up learning that much of what one encounters in life is beyond one’s control, and that a good way to maintain one’s independence is to emphasize their integrity and resilience during tough times.  This orientation leads to an outlook to accept and cope with occasions where one don’t end up with what he or she wanted.  Several other studies conducted by Snibbe and Markus further support their case.  Even within an individualized culture, we can see clear differences in people’s perceptions of choice and control.
Motivations to Fit in or to Stick Out
	In many occasions when people are deciding how to behave in a group of others they can decide to go either of two ways.  First, they can strive to act in a way that fits in well with others, thereby increasing group harmony at the expense of their own individual distinctiveness.  Alternatively, they can decide to act in such a way that they stick out from others, highlighting their uniqueness at the potential risk of not getting along so well with others.  People are often in the position to make such a decision, and the way they reach their decisions is influenced by their cultures.  
	Perhaps the most dramatic explorations of how people make decisions of whether they should fit in or stick out were conducted by Solomon Asch (Asch, 1956), using his famous conformity paradigm.  Participants were faced with a decision of either stating what they saw and thereby contradicting a unanimous group of confederates who had already expressed a discrepant view, or of going along with the group and ignoring what they had seen with their own eyes.  In his studies Asch found that most Americans would conform at least once in the context of this paradigm.  
	Asch argued that people conformed in this experimental design because of a desire to be accepted by others, reflecting the normative influence of conformity.  People tend to fare better when others do not view them negatively and reject them.  The social costs to dissenting would seem to be considerably greater in collectivistic societies in which people have more obligations with their ingroup members, and have a stronger motivation to achieve a sense of belongingness.  The Asch conformity paradigm has been immensely influential, and it has been replicated well over 100 times in 17 different countries.  A meta-analysis of these studies revealed one clear trend: although Americans show a great deal of conformity in this paradigm, people from more collectivistic cultures conform even more (Bond & Smith, 1996).  Motivations to fit in are stronger in cultural contexts that encourage people to maintain strong relationships with others (although it is possible that there are weaker cultural differences for informational conformity).  
	In contrast to a motivation to conform, we can also consider people’s motivations to stick out and to be unique.  People with independent views of self see their identity as ultimately grounded in their individual qualities.  Their identity is not so much shared with others, and thus is perceived to be fundamentally unique.  Maintaining a view of oneself that is consistent with cultural values of independence, then, should be aided by striving to view oneself as a unique and special individual.  Thinking of oneself as unique will highlight that one really is separate from others.
	In contrast, people with interdependent views of self see their identity as ultimately grounded in their relationships with significant others.  Identity is experienced as shared, and thus there should be less motivation to view oneself as separate and distinct from those important others.  Aspiring for a view of self that emphasizes one’s interdependence should be aided when individuals don’t view themselves as especially different.  Being different suggests that one might not be fitting in as well.  As such we should expect to find that people with interdependent views of self would be less motivated to see themselves as unique compared with those with independent views of self.
	Kim and Markus (1999) investigated this hypothesis with a clever study.  European-descent and Asian-descent participants were recruited at an airport and were asked to complete a questionnaire.  In return for their time, they were offered a pen.  The experimenter had a bag full of red and green pens, and would reach down and pull out a handful of 5 of them, and ask the participants to take a pen of their choice.  By doing this it was ensured that all participants had to make a choice between pens of two different colors, and that they also had to choose between pens that were either of a majority color (3 or 4 pens of the same color) or those of a minority color (1 or 2 pens of the same color).  The findings revealed that the European-Americans were much more likely to choose the pen of the minority color.   In stark contrast, the East Asians were more likely to choose the pen of the majority color.  Apparently, the European-Americans maintain a desire to express their uniqueness by making what they think are unique choices, whereas East Asians maintain a desire to express their belongingness by making what they think are common choices.  Other analyses and other studies that Kim and Markus conducted corroborated that this is why the people made these divergent choices (also see Kim & Drolet, 2003).
	Motivations for uniqueness are thus quite different between these two cultural groups.  An important question to consider is how these particular motivations, and cultural ideas more generally, come to be so widespread within cultures, yet so different between cultures.  Kim and Markus (1999) were interested in this question when they were studying cultural differences in motivations for uniqueness.  They felt that one way to observe these different motivations being communicated would be to look at messages in advertisements.  The kind of message that would be most persuasive would be one that reflects ideas that are widely shared within a culture.  Kim and Markus investigated how common themes were in advertisements in magazines in Korea and the US that either expressed uniqueness or conformity.  They looked at several categories of magazines (e.g., business magazines, women’s magazines, etc) from each country and took a note of each advertisement that they encountered.  They coded each ad with respect to whether it contained a theme for conformity (e.g., “Seven out of 10 people are using this product”) or a theme for uniqueness (e.g., “Ditch the Joneses”).  They found that uniqueness themes were more common in American ads than in Korean ones, and conformity themes were more common in Korean ads than in American ones.  This suggests that the kinds of cultural messages that people encounter on a day-to-day basis are helping to reinforce the different views of self in the two cultures. 
Conclusion
	To have a rich understanding of how people are motivated it is necessary to understand the cultural contexts that afford and constrain the kinds of things that people will pursue.  Although all of the motivations discussed in this chapter are likely understood and experienced by people from all cultures (i.e., they are all existential, if not functional universals; Norenzayan & Heine, in press), the degree that they are emphasized, and whether they are prioritized, varies considerably, as the above research demonstrates.  People from different cultures vary in their motivations because they have become attuned to the different contingencies associated with those motivations.  For example, when an individual is participating in a context in which the benefits of fitting in far outweigh the costs, it is likely that he or she will become especially motivated to fit in when in that context.  To the extent that the individual usually finds themselves in such contexts, and rarely finds themselves in contexts in which greater benefits can be derived from sticking out, an orientation towards seeking ways to fit in should become routinized and prioritized for that individual.  Furthermore, if that individual is continually surrounded by others who are also habitually attending to fitting in because they too more often find themselves in contexts where such an orientation is facilitated, an emphasis on fitting in will likely become a norm that will serve to guide how individuals value fitting in more generally.  Because cultures differ precisely in the kinds of situations with which they provide their members, people in different cultures come to be motivated in importantly divergent ways.  In these ways, culture and psyche come to make each other up (Shweder, 1990).

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