ABSTRACT
HAZEL MARKUS, A Stanford University professor, conducted a study in which her research team recruited two groups of people from the waiting areas at the San Francisco airport. e rst group was made up of people who had been born in America and who spoke English at home. e second group was made up of people who were born in Korea or China, citizens of those countries, and primarily spoke Chinese or Korean. Each of these people was asked to ll out a brief survey in exchange for a pen as a gi. ey were permitted to choose from a selection of pens: most of them were orange and a few were green. ree-quarters of the Americans chose green, the least common color. For example, if there were two green pens and ten orange ones, they would choose green. e students from Korea and China, on the other hand, displayed a dierent pattern: e vast majority opted for the most common color in the selection of pens, avoiding the rare color. is behavior isn’t just random, according to Marcus. Rather, in her study she posits that the behavior reects deeper cultural characteristics consistent with other studies: Americans, compared to East Asians, tend to seek uniqueness more than sameness. Standing out and/or originality are valued as features of one’s personality and encouraged from the time one is a child in the United States. To the contrary, in East Asian cultures, people are inclined to think about themselves in terms of commonalities in relation to other people and community (Kim & Marcus, 1999; Koerth-Baker, 2013). A recent study compared the behavior of Facebook users to that of people using Renren, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook. e researchers found Facebook users share posts reecting a focus on their own “selves”— seles, for example. Renren user posts, in contrast, focus on “us” as opposed to the American focus on “me” (Qiu et al., 2013).
