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The Universality of Psychological Autonomy Across Cultures: Arguments from Developmental and Social Psychology

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Human Motivation and Interpersonal Relationships

Abstract

This chapter addresses a long debated problem of universality of psychological autonomy across cultures. The author defines autonomy and articulates its three components – life goals and moral rules, affective and sensual demands, and social norms and expectations, and three levels of processing these components – awareness/mindfulness, reflectivity, and decision making. He states that sense of self, which function at two levels: a core experiential pre-reflective self and an autobiographical, narrative, and reflected self, constitutes the center of autonomous functioning of every human being. He uses arguments from developmental, social, and cultural psychology to validate his position that human autonomy is a culturally universal phenomenon. Autonomy requires for its development a socio-cultural environment, thus, everywhere where there are meaningful social interactions mediated by language it may emerge. The author also differentiates cultural models and ideologies of independent/individualistic versus interdependent/collectivistic selves from a first-person, perspectival self that initiates and regulates autonomous functioning and discusses the consequences of confusion between these understandings.

To be published in Netta Weinstein (Ed). The Autonomous Personality in Interpersonal Interactions: Theory, Research, and Applications. Springer Portions of this chapter are based on (Chirkov, 2010, 2011b).

This project was partially implemented in the framework of the Programme of Fundamental Studies of the Higher School of Economics in 2011 (project 63.0 “The role of sociocultural context and values in socio-economic behaviour in modern Russia”).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For examples of autonomy research in social and personality psychology see the self-determination theory studies (Ryan & Niemiec, 2009); in developmental psychology see (Brandtstädter, 1999; Grolnick, 2003; Helwig, 2006; Kagitcibasi, 2007; Keller, 2007; Rogoff, 2003); in psychotherapy see (Gruen, 2007; Ryan & Deci, 2008; Shapiro, 1984).

  2. 2.

    The main contributors to this endeavor are Stoic philosophers (Bobzien, 1998; Cooper, 2003; Hadot, 1995, 1998; Long, 2004), Spinoza (Spinoza, 2000; Uyl, 2003) and Kant (Guyer, 2000, 2003) with a strong input from existential, humanistic psychologists, and moral philosophers (Maslow, 1968; May, 1981; Oshana, 2003). Modern interpreters of Confucius and his followers tackle the problem of the Ancient Chinese interpretations of human self, self-determination and free will and demonstrated that they are similar to the Western understandings of the same phenomena (Chan, 2002; Cheng, 2004; Chong, 2003).

  3. 3.

    Starting with the Stoics and followed by many religions and philosophical doctrines, this proposition of following the nature of things has been associated with understanding the gods’ divine script about the universe and human beings in it and acting in accordance with it (Cooper, 2003). This spiritual component of autonomous functioning has for the most part been neglected in modern thinking about autonomy. For atheists this proposition means that autonomous people have to acquire a high level of knowledge about the world, societies, and human beings so that their goals and values do not go against the ways in which the world functions.

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  1. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Valery Chirkov

  2. Higher School of Economics - National Research University, Moscow, Russia

    Valery Chirkov

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    Netta Weinstein

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Chirkov, V. (2014). The Universality of Psychological Autonomy Across Cultures: Arguments from Developmental and Social Psychology. In: Weinstein, N. (eds) Human Motivation and Interpersonal Relationships. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8542-6_2

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