Self-Organization and Social Organization: U.S. and Chinese Constructions

From the writings of William James (1890) onward, the construct of the social self has been widely employed in North American and European social psychology (see Markus & Cross, 1990, for a review). Many of the most influential theoretical perspectives in social psychology concern how a person cognitively represents and emotionally identifies with groups: social identity theory (Hogg & Abrams, 1988; Tajfel & Turner, 1979), social categorization theory (Turner, 1987), and the group value model (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Although James and many of his Western intellectual heirs have voiced the caveat that the social self is experienced differently in other cultural systems, until very recently there has been little psychological research on this issue.