Immediate-Return Societies: What Can They Tell Us About the Self and Social Relationships in Our Society?

W hen researchers study their phenomena within a narrow range of participants (e.g., similar age, same culture), they cannot be sure if their results generalize to anyone outside of that range. This means they cannot be sure if their findings reflect context-free principles of behavior, or descriptive regularities bound to given local and historical contexts. To address this ambiguity, some social psychologists have begun to explore their findings using a wider range of samples. For example, they have compared Eastern and Western cultures (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) or subgroups within a given culture, such as Americans of African, Asian, and European descent (Sinclair, Hardin, & Lowery, 2006). Although important insights can be gained from such research, we believe that this research is, of all things, culturally limited. It compares groups that, although different along some dimensions, are very similar along other dimensions. For example, despite their well-documented differences, individuals in Japan and the United States live in highly technological countries, are relatively sedentary (in the sense of being non-nomadic), and are subject to the pressures of living in relatively dense populations. These are important commonalities that could lead to similarities in a number of psychological phenomena including the self and interpersonal relationships. To the extent that common cultural influences contribute to behavioral similarities, comparisons among cultures that are dominant in the world today may fail to reveal important cultural influences even though these influences are present. To be especially informative, comparisons would have to be among cultures that share as few features as possible. In this chapter, we consider the conclusions drawn in social psychology research on the self and interpersonal relationships— but we consider them in the context of an extreme cultural comparison.