University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Hazel Markus
Stanford University
"Psychology: Made in the USA"
Presented on May 5, 2005
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- Abstract:
-
Psychology is an American product because it has a distinctive American
style. The style derives from its implicit and underlying model of
agency, a model that is built deeply and broadly into the foundation of
psychological theorizing in all areas — social, personality,
developmental, cognitive, neuroscience, evolutionary and clinical (Markus
& Kitayama, 2004; Miller, 2004). This model holds that normatively good
actions originate in the attributes of an autonomous self, and that the
actions of this self should be experienced as disjoint, that is, as
separate from the actions of others. This model of agency as
disjoint is widely distributed and reflected in American economic,
political and legal institutions, in the media, in religion and in
language. In other cultural contexts, there are other solutions to the
problem of what impels individual action. For example, in a
conjoint model of agency, others are formative of agency such that
individual actions require the consideration and anticipation of the
perspective of meaningful others. Studies comparing features of American
and East Asian contexts, as well as studies comparing the responses of
individuals engaging in these contexts, suggest that differences in models
of agency can explain cultural variation in a wide variety of
psychological experience including motivation, choice, cognitive
dissonance and well being. Studies within American contexts, comparing
middle class and working class contexts, suggest that the disjoint model
is a good fit for middle class contexts, but not for working class
contexts, where agency assumes other forms. Working class contexts do not
easily afford the sense of having many choices and many opportunities for
self and expression and control over environments. Together these studies
suggest that how people experience agency can vary quite dramatically
depending on the prevalent ideas, structures, and practices of their
contexts, and that psychology's basic descriptive and normative model of
agency is, in fact, a middle class American one.
- About the Speaker:
- Hazel Rose Markus has been a professor of psychology at Stanford
University since 1994. Prior to that she was a faculty member in the
department of psychology at the University of Michigan where she held the
Helen Peak Professorship of Psychology and was awarded the Distinguished
Faculty Achievement Award. She was also a research scientist at the
Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Professor Markus is the author of more that 100 publications, most of them focusing on the role of self in regulating behavior and on the ways in which the self is shaped by the social world. She has written on self-schemas, possible selves, the influence of the self on the perception of others, and on the constructive role of the self in adult development. Her most recent work is in the area of cultural psychology and explores the interdependence between psychological structures, processes and sociocultural environments.
She received her B.A. from California State University at San Diego and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals and study sections at the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging. She is a fellow of the APS and the APA. She was also a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Successful Midlife Development. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and was then named the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She currently serves as the co-director of Stanford's Research Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
For More Information About This Speaker:
- http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~hmarkus/
The website of Dr. Markus' lab.
