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Culture, Context, and Behavior - 2007 Matsumoto JOP
Culture, Context, and Behavior - 2007 Matsumoto JOP
David Matsumoto
San Francisco State University
HUMAN NATURE
Sheldon (2004) called these basic physical needs, and they include
eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping, eliminating, having sex, seeking
shelter, and otherwise staying healthy. Each of these needs is ulti-
mately related to reproductive success and helps ensure survival be-
cause reproductive success is a biological imperative if people are to
survive.
Throughout history, people must have solved a host of distinct
social problems in order to meet their basic physical needs and
achieve reproductive success. These social problems include negoti-
ating complex status hierarchies, forming successful work and social
groups, attracting mates, fighting off potential rivals for food and
sexual partners, giving birth and raising children, and battling nature
(Buss, 1988, 2001). In fact these problems exist in our everyday lives
today as well. To aid in our resolving these social problems, nature
endowed us with a small set of universal social motives. Sheldon
(2004) proposed that these social motives can be organized around
three major themes—autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Sim-
ilarly, Hogan (1982) posited the importance of the needs to get along
and get ahead. Presumably, these needs provide humans with the
motivation and ability to negotiate and solve complex social prob-
lems in order to meet their basic physical needs and survive.
CULTURE
Humans also uniquely have the ability to believe that other people
are intentional agents. This ability begins at around 9 months of age
(Tomasello, 1999). In one of Tomasello’s most recent studies, for
example, 18-month-old infants were presented with 10 different sit-
uations in which an adult experimenter was having trouble achieving
a goal (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). One of these situations was
when the experimenter accidentally dropped a marker and unsuc-
cessfully tried to reach for it. More times than not, the infants were
likely to help the adult experimenter, even though the experimenter
never asked for help or made eye contact with the infant. The fact
that human infants help others achieve their goals even though there
is no direct benefit to the infant suggests that they have an under-
standing of other people’s goals and an intrinsic motivation to help.
These skills were not demonstrated in chimpanzees in the same
study. Thus, we have causal beliefs, which form the basis for attri-
butions, a uniquely human product.
Humans also have unique abilities concerning self-other knowl-
edge. Clearly, other animals have knowledge or some conception of
self. But humans are unique in that they have knowledge of self,
knowledge of others, and knowledge that others know about the self
(Tomasello, 1999). This knowledge is necessary in order to have
morality, another uniquely human product. The existence of self-
conscious emotions (Tangney & Fischer, 1995), such as shame, guilt,
or pride, is also probably a product of this cognitive ability. The
existence of this ability is probably why we don’t just take off our
clothes in the middle of the street, have sex any time we want to, or
hit others whom we disagree with. Other animals, however, seem not
to care as much.
Humans also have the unique ability to build continually upon
improvements and discoveries. When humans create something that
is useful, it is usually improved upon. This is true for computers,
cars, audio music players, and, unfortunately, weapons of mass de-
struction and strategies for waging war. Tomasello, Kruger, and
Ratner (1993) call this the ratchet effect. Like a ratchet, an improve-
ment never goes backward; it only goes forward and continues to
improve upon itself. The ratchet effect does not occur in other an-
imals. Monkeys may use twigs to catch insects, but they never im-
prove upon that tool. Humans not only make tools; they make tools
to make tools, automate the process of making tools, and mass-dis-
tribute tools around the world for mass consumption.
Culture, Context, and Behavior 1293
Interactants
Because humans are social animals, and because human social life is
complex, we need to interact with many different types of others.
Survival requires social coordination, and human cultures ascribe
meaning to interactants to aid in this coordination. Without such
meaning there would be social chaos, which would ultimately be
detrimental to both individuals and groups. At least two studies have
examined what these meanings may be. Marwell and Hage (1970),
for instance, suggested the existence of three dimensions to describe
the nature of role-dyads: intimacy, visibility, and regulation. McAu-
ley, Bond, and Kashima (2002) obtained ratings of role-dyads in
Australia and Hong Kong and demonstrated the existence of four
dimensions used by persons of both cultures to organize these rela-
tionships: complexity, equality, adversarialness, and containment.
In my view, there are two major ways in which human cultures
ascribe meaning to others in order to aid social coordination: (1) the
relationship between the individual and the group and (2) the estab-
lishment and maintenance of hierarchies. With regard to the former,
all human societies make distinctions between ingroups and out-
groups (Brewer & Kramer, 1985; Messick & Mackie, 1989; Tajfel,
1982). Ingroups are afforded favored status by individuals and foster
coordination, conformity, and cooperation. Ingroups function effec-
tively to aid in the accomplishment of goals and activities that ul-
timately aid in the survival of the group. Outgroup members can
threaten the ability of ingroups to achieve their goals and, thus, their
survival. Self-ingroup relationships, therefore, are inherently differ-
ent from self-outgroup relationships, and in all societies, encultura-
tion involves learning who are ingroups and who are not, and the
specific meanings associated with them.
Culture, Context, and Behavior 1297
The Setting
Figure 1
Situational context moderates the relative contributions of basic
human nature, culture, and personality to mental processes and
behaviors.
Culture, Context, and Behavior 1305
CONCLUSION
The model presented in this article is consonant with Kluckhohn,
Murray, and Schneider’s (1953) notion over a half century ago that
every person is in certain respects like all others, like some
others, and like no others (p. 53). The model here suggests that,
broadly speaking, much human behavior can be accounted for by
Culture, Context, and Behavior 1309
dominant model in the field suggests that certain cultures are asso-
ciated with certain types of self-construals, for example, that indi-
vidualistic cultures produce independent self-construals, that
collectivistic cultures produce interdependent self-construals, and
that these different self-construals, in turn, produce different types of
behaviors (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). This viewpoint, however,
essentially substitutes culture for a personality-type variable to ex-
plain group differences. Individuals in all cultures, however, prob-
ably have multiple senses of self, such as the private, public, and
collective self (Triandis, 1989). Moreover, the nature of self-cons-
truals can differ, depending on how they are assessed in question-
naires (Matsumoto, Weissman, Preston, Brown, & Kupperbusch,
1997; Rhee, Uleman, & Lee, 1996; Uleman, Rhee, Bardoliwalla,
Semin, & Toyama, 2000); in experiments, different culturally based
self-construals can be accessed within the same individuals depend-
ing on how they are primed (Gardner, Gabriel, & Lee, 1999; Trafi-
mow, Silverman, Fan, & Law, 1997; Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto,
1991; Ybarra & Trafimow, 1988). This suggests a more complex view
of the relationship between culture, self, and behavior, based on the
model presented here, one in which individuals have multiple senses
of self, some of which are more encouraged in some cultures than
others, and that the relative contributions of each in influencing be-
havior are dependent on the specific situational context in which
behavior is elicited and self and culture are measured (Matsumoto,
1999).
Another line of research that is laden with apparently contradic-
tory findings but that can be reconciled with the model proposed
here concerns the area of self-enhancement. Many studies have
shown that Americans self-enhance (Heine, 2005; Heine, Lehman,
Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Markus & Kitayama, 1991), but Jap-
anese do not (Takata, 1987) and are often cited as evidence for cul-
ture specificity in the need for uniqueness. Recent research, however,
clearly shows that Japanese and people of other supposedly collec-
tivistic cultures also self-enhance ( J. D. Brown & Kobayashi, 2002;
Endo, Heine, & Lehman, 2000; Harrington & Liu, 2002; Kobayashi
& Brown, 2003; Kobayashi & Greenwald, 2003; Kurman, 2001;
Sedikides et al., 2003). Most recently, Sedikides, Gaertner, and
Vevea (2005) have clearly shown that the emergence or nonemer-
gence of self-enhancement across cultures is dependent on the situ-
ational context in which it is assessed, a finding that is consistent
Culture, Context, and Behavior 1311
with the idea presented here that situational context moderates be-
haviors. Members of all cultures self-enhance; they just do it differ-
ently in different cultures (i.e., in different situational contexts).
I suspect that there are other lines of evidence that demonstrate
how an aspect of human functioning has universal, cultural, and in-
dividual-level effects and how different situational contexts elicit
different relative amounts of each in producing observed behaviors.
Given that many studies are conducted in laboratories or with ques-
tionnaires, researchers should give consideration to the specific
meanings such situational contexts have vis-à-vis the responses ob-
served and studied. Such contexts may or may not provide data that
are commensurate with how people behave in other contexts. Even
within such contexts, changing the way in which questions are asked
can alter responses drastically (Schwarz, 1999). Future integrative
theorizing may be better served by acknowledging the existence of
multiple, different sources of behavior and the role of situational
context in moderating the relative contributions of each in the pro-
duction of human behavior.
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