Korean Culture - Articles/Summary of reading

Reflections on "The Contribution of Individualism vs. Collectivism to Cross-National Differences in Display Rules"*

Cultural Display Rules defined: ". . . learned rules that dictate the management of emotional expressions based on social circumstances" (148).

Culture and social context affect how members of differing cultures express themselves and interpret facial expressions of others. Matsumoto, et al. explain that facial expressions are a combination of the biological and the cultural, where the cultural is based on contextual cues. In other words, we all have the basic responses of happiness, sadness, joy, grief, etc. - and while we all smile when we are happy, for example, across cultures we may find that individuals find different situations as appropriate for smiling - while others may not.

This article is refreshing in many ways, one is how the authors differentiated between what people should do (when studied) and what participants actually do (152), and two is the authors' forthrightness about the problems in designating and measuring individualism vs. collectivism. Most of the articles I've read ignore this, presenting research/results as if this bi-polar division is acceptable to - and accepted by - all readers. The initial and ongoing issues of contrastive rhetoric (see "Contrastive Rhetoric," by Ulla Connor)  should trip many of us up here and cause us to consider why this dichotomy is (I assume) accepted. That said, the authors do not negate the importance of individualism vs. collectivism (IC). They consider this construct as it "exists on the individual as well as macro-social levels reflecting significant and reliable differences across individuals as well as larger cultural groups" (163), while they qualify IC by explaining the roles of the following: individual constructs, cultural constructs, power distancing, and status differentiation (163) (not to mention gender issues). (Additionally, I assume that these four qualifiers do not demarcate a discussion of IC.)

Reading this more objective (and therefore helpful) study/discussion reinforces what I continue to tell my students: 1) More research (within limits) rather than too little research acts as a safety net, and 2) confronting audience issues (i.e., what we think our readers might find questionable - on their own) builds ethos.


*Matsumoto, David, Sachiko Takeuchi, Sari Andayani, Natalia Kouznetsova, and Deborah Krupp. "The contribution of individualism vs. collectivism to cross-national differences in display rules." Asian Journal of Social Psychology 1 (1998): 147-65. Print.