Precarious Lives Predict Culturally Deviant Psychologies: Extending the Psychology of Marginalization From Japan to the US

Previously published work suggests that marginalized Japanese youth have psychologies that deviate from interdependent self-orientations. To test whether this pattern extends to an independent self-construal, two previous experiments originally conducted in Japan were replicated in the United States. In Study 1, risk of marginalization was measured among 109 American undergraduates according to a previously developed measure. As expected, high-risk American undergraduates were less independent. That is, they were less motivated by success than by failure compared to low-risk American undergraduates. Similarly, in Study 2 with 144 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Americans, high-risk American MTurkers were, again, less independent. That is, they were less motivated to maintain the perception of self-consistency in their behaviours compared to the low-risk American MTurkers. Furthermore, American MTurkers who were classified as “high risk” were also living more precarious lives in the U.S. Across cultures, the patterns of results were reversed due to opposing cultural norms according to predominant self-construal. Thus, the tendency to be marginalized in society seems to predict the tendency to have culturally deviant psychologies: this pattern seems to be generalizable across both an interdependent society like Japan and an independent society like the United States.