But there is another way to look at things. More collectivist societies tend to produce people whose views of their selves are more heavily influenced (and to an extent determined) by their social relations. This model is often referred to as the “interdependent self.” Very broadly speaking, the interdependent self is less conscious of boundaries between itself and others, more willing to perceive actions as occurring because of group dynamics (rather than assertions of solitary will), less interested in choices being perceived as individual, and more conscious of the thoughts and feelings of other people from the same cultural group. This doesn’t mean that an interdependent self is automatically favorably inclined toward the people with whom it has relationships, merely that such a self will be more aware of and responsive to those relationships. Or, to put it another way, the interdependent self is perfectly capable of being annoyed with its siblings; it’s just going to think of itself as being implicated in the lives of those siblings more often and more deeply than its independent counterpart.

The differences between these two general ideas of selfhood have emerged in a series of psychological experiments dating back to a foundational study by Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama in 1991. Researchers following in the footsteps of Markus and Kitayama have found, for example, that when offered five pens, only one of which is colored differently from the others, almost 80 percent of European Americans will pick the distinctive pen, as opposed to roughly 30 percent of East Asians. Similar distinctions emerge in research regarding the ways the accomplishments of a given self are thought to have been achieved. A study of coverage of the 2000 and 2002 Olympics found that the American media focused to a much higher degree on “the positive personal characteristics of athletes and on the competition”—in other words, the assumption was that athletes had been successful because of their individual will to compete, not because of the intervention of others. Japanese coverage, by contrast, tended to emphasize “a broader array of factors, both positive and negative,” with the athletes’ backgrounds and experiences generally appearing more often than references to competition. A second part of that study involved giving subjects in the United States and Japan a biographical sketch of a fictional Olympic athlete from their respective countries. The researchers asked the subjects to pick the most relevant items for media coverage of that athlete from a list of forty that had been taken from actual news reports. As the study puts it:

The Americans chose statements emphasizing two categories—personal attributes and uniqueness—significantly more than the Japanese. The Japanese, however, chose statements emphasizing four categories—athlete’s coach and team, motivation, emotion, and doubt—significantly more than the Americans.