Culture and the Structure of Personal Experience: Insider and Outsider Phenomenologies of the Self and Social World

This chapter argues for the importance of understanding the role of culture in structuring people's personal phenomenological experience. Such an understanding is (1) important per se and (2) important for elucidating the feedback loops between culture and self, between macro‐level ideology and micro‐level experience. To illustrate, we contrast the “outsider” perspective on the self of Asian‐Americans with the “insider” perspective on the world for Euro‐Americans. We examine (1) the outsider versus insider perspective by looking at the phenomenology of memory imagery, online imagery, visualization and embodiment of narratives, and relational versus egocentric projection; (2) the implications for cultural differences in egocentric biases that derive from dwelling too much in one's own internal experience; and (3) the emergence of developmental differences in characterizing the social world. We argue that the lessons of experience and cultural ideology cocreate each other, and we illustrate this by describing some ways that distinct phenomenological experiences are intimately tied to cultural norms, beliefs, and ideals.

Introduction

To say that a person “sees herself through other people's eyes” or “takes other people's perspective” implies something about how people act in relation to others. Conversely, to say that someone is “self‐absorbed” or “lives in his own world” indicates something about people's failure to think about others. The expressions are usually meant metaphorically, but they also have a more literal interpretation that implies something about the actual phenomenology that the person experiences. In the present chapter, we examine how people from different subcultures may experience the self in ways that make a literal interpretation of these metaphors plausible; and in taking the metaphors literally, we try to address one of the important puzzles of cultural psychology, namely how micro‐level individual phenomenological experience and macro‐level cultural ideology can reinforce and recreate each other.

Much research in cultural and cross‐cultural psychology has focused on content or the what of culture: What are the attitudes, beliefs, and values that differentiate between cultures? What are the contents of the independent versus interdependent self? What are the scripts, norms, and expectations that drive behavior? On the other hand, a good deal of attention has been paid subsequently to the process or the how of culture: How do people process information about the social world differently (Kuhnen 2002, Nisbett 2001)? How do people juggle multiple identities (Hong 2000, Oyserman 2007)? How do cultural practices get patterned by interpersonal interactions and affordances in the environment (Cohen 2001, Kitayama 1999, Kitayama 1997, Miller 1995)?

In this chapter, we argue that studying people's phenomenological experience of themselves in the world is another important route to understanding how psyches and cultures make each other up. To be a person in the world feels like something, and this feeling of the self in the world can arise from our cultural ideologies and in turn can help to recreate those ideologies. The perceptions, the imagery, the memories, the mental models, the salience (or lack of salience) of our own internal thoughts and physical sensations, and the (real or imagined) feeling of being in tune with another person all structure the feeling of being a self in the world.

Here we focus on what might be called an “outsider” phenomenology of self versus an “insider” phenomenology. These are differences in the forms or structures of experience. In the “outsider” (or third person) form of experience, a person experiences himself or herself from the point of view of an outsider looking at the self. In the “insider” (or first person) form of experience, a person does not see himself or herself as others would; instead, the insider dwells in his or her own private, internal experiences and may end up either (1) projecting those experiences onto others or (2) mistaking the private, internal experience for something that is actually “out there” in the world.

We argue that understanding the phenomenology of being a self in the social world is extremely important for understanding two different subcultural systems. We examine this phenomenology for Asian‐Americans and Euro‐Americans and show how it manifests in predictable situations.¹ As Nagel (1974) pointed out in a very different context, one of the key features of consciousness is that consciousness feels like something. And similarly, being a cultural being in the world feels like something that is hard to reduce to a simple collection of beliefs, attitudes, or artifacts. It feels a certain way to be a self in one cultural system or another; and in itself, understanding these differences is an extremely important part of understanding culture.