Distinctiveness Motives as a Source of the Social Self

Many of the most influential theoretical perspectives in social psychology concern how a person cognitively represents and emotionally identifies with groups: social identity theory, social categorization theory and the group value model. Scholars of cultural psychology have objected to the tendency in contemporary social psychology to take the behavior of an individual as a given quality, which can be isolated in the laboratory and made to interact with other factors. The social identity perspective is another research tradition that rejects methodological individualism and envisions a role for social structure in the psychology of the self. Proponents of this tradition have maintained that society is made up of social categories, which its members use to interpret social behavior. This chapter presents two models that encapsulate important differences between Chinese and US social organization. Chinese social structure conforms more closely to the Individual Accommodates Structure model, and US social structure conforms more closely to the Structure Accommodates Individual model.