ABSTRACT
This chapter explores attitudes about earthquake risk and tendencies towards independent or interdependent orientation. It discusses US and Japanese populations on dimensions that measured "human agency" or "fatalism with respect to earthquake hazards. Optimism is traditional to American culture. Americans eschew the notion that anything or anyone can limit their future if only they try hard enough. Optimism is associated with the American ideology of individualism and its complex cultural pattern that is rooted in large part in the view of the self as independent. In Japanese culture, importance is placed in negative information about the self, information about how one has failed to meet the group-defined standards of excellence. In sum, "optimism" and "self-improvement" have different meanings in the two cultures. These notions also have different impacts on decision-making. The issue of volunteerism or helping others, particularly strangers, is another cultural dimension on which the United States and Japan differ.
