Cultural Psychologists claim that people in different cultures have different selves. They have a lot of data showing that Asian selves and American selves are quite different. But what does this even mean? I think we need to make a couple of distinctions before this make sense for those of us coming from the direction of philosophical discussions of the self and personal identity.

To begin with, what is a self? My view is that a self is just a person, a human being with the normal capacities of thought, memory, reason, and the like. ``My self” is like “my neighbor”. My neighbor is just an ordinary person, thought of as the person who lives next to me. My father was just an ordinary person, thought of as the person who fathered me. `Self’ means `identical with’. Suppose I say, ``Obama doesn’t like `drama kings or queens’ and expects everyone in his office, his secretary, his national security advisor, andhimself, to remain cool and rational. When I say `himself’ I'm just referring to Obama by the relation he has to the person I am talking about --- namely, identity.

Now admittedly this simple theory doesn’t fit with a lot that we say and think about selves. Philosophers often talk of the self as though it were an inner principle of some sort. We say that a person should be true to himself, or that a person is not herself this morning. This doesn’t seem to make much sense if the self is just the person.

I think that’s better thought of as talk about ourconcepts我们自己。我们每个人都有一个非常重要的概念，我们用“我”这个词来表达这个概念。这是我们看待自己的方式。它是我们存储所有我们得到的信息的地方，比如我们在想什么，我们做事情的原因。与我对他人的概念相比，我对自己的概念有一个相当特殊的结构。但在我看来，我的自我概念可能在很多基本方面与其他人对自己的概念相似，无论他们来自日本或中国，甚至像Ken一样来自俄亥俄州。

For example, we all think that we have bodies, that we can control in ways no one else can, just by deciding and willing what to do. We all think we have special ways, our senses, of finding out about what is going on around those bodies. We all think we have special access to our own thoughts and sensations. And so on and so forth.

Even within this agreement, there is room for important differences between people, and patterns of difference between cultures. One important consideration is which things we find most important about ourselves, the ways we can’t even imagine being different. For example, I’m from Nebraska. But I have clearly not seen that fact about me as being tremendously important. When I left Nebraska after college, I didn’t think anything important aboutmehad changed; I was just in different situation, with different opportunities.

That’s a pretty common attitude for Americans. We pick up and move at the drop of a hat. Cultural psychologists will tell you that that's pretty unusual. Far more common, especially in Asia, is that who one is --- one’s self-concept in my vocabulary --- is rooted in one’s home, one’s family, one’s ancestors. Moving across a country, or across the world, is hard to imagine. It may be necessary, but it will be traumatic.

例如，我的朋友图提亚(Syun Tutiya)每天要花三个小时穿过整个东京去千叶大学(Chiba University)上班。他不会搬得更近，即使房价更便宜，因为这意味着他要离开他的父母和兄弟，他们都住在他家世代居住的社区里。我觉得这有点奇怪，但他觉得我离开内布拉斯加州有点奇怪，我家几代人都住在这里，却从没想过要回来。

One important difference is the western emphasis on ``individualism”. We think what is most important about people are their individual values and ideas, the beliefs they've developed from their own unique perspective. Data shows that Americans, if asked about who they are, will emphasize facts about their biography that differentiate them from other people, while Asians will emphasize where they are from, and what the people in that city or region do. We think of our “American individualism” as an expression of the great discoveries of the Enlightenment, which Americans are kindly educating the rest of the world about. But cultural psychologists may think it is a culture-bound way of thinking that’s no more valid than any other way of thinking.

To help us think through all of this, our guest is Hazel Markus from Stanford University, editor ofEngaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies.