Cultural Identity Dynamics and Intersubjective Cultural Representations

Wan’s article in this special issue provides a concise review of the intersubjective (cultural) representation approach (Chiu, Gelfand, Yamagishi, Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010) while also briefly describing the accumulated empirical evidence supporting its utility in predicting the strength of individuals’ social (e.g., institutional, political, cultural) identities (Wan, Chiu, Peng, & Tam, 2007; Wan, Chiu, Tam, et al., 2007; Wan, Tam, & Chiu, 2010). Importantly, the article also includes a section on future directions where Wan describes some ways in which the intersubjective representation approach could also uniquely contribute to our understanding of the development and dynamics of cultural identity, especially in multicultural contexts. Readers already familiar with the basic tenets of the intersubjective representation approach and those with a particular interest in the multicultural identity processes and related constructs (e.g., acculturation, social identity complexity) will find this later section particularly interesting.

In this commentary, I first bring attention to a few basic definitional issues that remain unanswered in Wan’s article. Next, I offer some insights into how the intersubjective representation approach can advance our understanding of intergroup dynamics, and I also elaborate on the relevance of personal cultural representations for understanding multicultural identity processes. I conclude with some thoughts about the alternative conceptualization of culture that underlies the intersubjective (cultural) representation approach.

The intersubjective representation approach aims to understand culture on the basis of individuals’ social perceptions (representations) about the values that most people in that culture consider important, rather than from what these individuals are like (i.e., their own personal values and preferences). In Wan and colleagues’ studies, cultural representations are captured by asking participants to rate the importance that a particular value or set of values has for an average member of their cultural group. I see this method as a simple and effective way to identify values collectively defined as important and central to a particular culture. Yet, to the naïve reader within social psychology, a full appreciation of the main theoretical and methodological strengths of this approach would require providing early on some initial answers to two basic theoretical questions. First, it is unclear how the intersubjective representation approach intersects with or departs from traditional social representation theory (SRT; Moliner & Tafani, 1997; Moscovici & Hewstone, 1983), an approach that is still quite popular among some European social psychologists. SRT, which brought social constructivist tenets to social psychology, is similar to the intersubjective representation approach in that it views social objects, such as culture, as jointly constructed and validated. Specifically, SRT posits that individuals and groups are characterized by certain kinds of shared knowledge and understanding (i.e., social representations), which enable them to name and classify the various aspects of their social reality (e.g., gender, culture, ideology, etc.) and also provide them with a sense of community or shared identity. Clarifying how the intersubjective (cultural) representation approach goes beyond SRT seems necessary for basic definitional purposes. For instance, is it possible that while for SRT, a necessary property of social representations is that their content is shared across individuals, while for the intersubjective representation approach, this is not a necessary condition? (I return to this issue in my next point.) Ultimately, clarifying how these two approaches might intersect could also prove relevant to the ongoing discussions on how to successfully integrate the more constructivist and sociological accounts provided by SRT and the more atomistic and psychological accounts provided by mainstream social cognition models to provide a more complete and rich understanding of social behavior (Augoustinos, Walker, & Donaghue, 2014; Deaux & Philogène, 2001; Voelklein & Howarth, 2005).

Second, early on, Wan states that intersubjective awareness of cultural norms—defined as the aggregate of individuals’ perception regarding what is culturally important for the group—can be used as a proxy for “collectively validated cultural characteristics” (p. 1269). Thus, Wan’s notion of collective (i.e., aggregated) validation implies joint “construction” rather than social sharedness (i.e., social consensus about the values that are important in one’s culture). Still, the issue of whether these representations are also socially shared through social learning and norm transmission remains unclear. Should this type of value importance consensus and social sharedness even be expected?—That is, what kind of convergence/variability should we expect among individuals belonging to the same cultural group in their ratings of the group’s value importance? Or alternatively, will the variability (or lack of sharedness) be high, such as the one recently reported for personal values (Schwartz, 2014)? I will return to this later question one more time later, when discussing recent developments in the field of cultural psychology that have questioned sharedness as a fundamental feature of a group’s cultural values and norms. In any case, it seems imperative that future research and theorizing on intersubjective cultural representations by Wan and colleagues tackles the sharedness issue.

Wan persuasively argues that aggregated individual perceptions regarding the importance that a particular value or set of values has for an average member of a particular cultural group (vs. individuals’ self-rated importance) yield unique information about the core cultural values that might truly distinguish different cultural groups. Furthermore, an individual’s degree of identification with a target cultural group can be predicted from that individual’s self-endorsement of the values collectively supported in that culture. ¹ Undoubtedly, these two types of information (which values are collectively perceived as normative and which values individuals themselves subscribe to) can be useful in answering important social and cultural psychological questions. For instance, individual perceptions regarding how normatively important certain values are for one’s cultural ingroup(s) can also be used as a measure of cultural or national auto-stereotypes (see Realo et al., 2009; Terracciano et al., 2005; for similar approaches in the personality domain). Similarly, individual perceptions regarding how normatively important certain values are for specific cultural outgroups can also be used as a measure of cultural or national hetero-stereotypes. Researchers can rely on these two types of intersubjective cultural representations (auto and hetero) to predict certain types of intergroup conflict and also examine how cultural identification moderates these processes. For instance, a study by Dobewall and Strack (2011) shows that perceived, rather than self-rated, value differences between ethnic Estonians and Russian-speaking minorities (living in Estonia) explain the conflict between these two groups; furthermore, the stronger these individuals’ respective ethnocultural identities, the more extreme their value auto- and hetero-stereotypes. In sum, cross-national and cross-group studies relying on the intersubjective cultural representation approach could fruitfully contribute to the renewed interest in examining national character perceptions and their validity and consequences (e.g., Terracciano et al., 2005). Together, these two approaches (intersubjective cultural representation and national character studies) might further establish the idea that collective and individual perceptions regarding a group’s normative personality and value importance, rather than objective cultural differences in personality and value endorsement, best explain intra and inter group dynamics, including identification with and attitudes about these groups.

Importantly, as also argued by Wan, intersubjective approaches can also illuminate within-individual cultural dynamics. Specifically, biculturals’ ability to develop an integrated and cohesive bicultural identity is likely to be influenced by the match/mismatch between the values and other psychological attributes (e.g., personality traits) that biculturals themselves perceive as normative for each of their two cultural (ethnic and mainstream) ingroups. Results from Miramontez, Benet-Martínez, and Nguyen’s (2008) study with Hispanic biculturals supports this exact hypothesis in the domain of personality attributes. The study shows that Hispanic biculturals’ degree of Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) is predicted by the match/mismatch between the personality profiles they perceived as normative in each of their two cultural (e.g., Mexican and North American) ingroups. Interestingly, BII was also predicted by the match between these biculturals’ own self-reported personality profiles and the personality profiles they perceive as normative for Mexican and North American individuals.

Wan’s point that, in multicultural contexts, collective representations about both the mainstream (e.g., North American) and ethnic (e.g., Latino, African American) subcultures and their compatibility might differ between majority and minority members is also worth exploring. Logically, intergroup contact between majority and minority culture members (e.g., natives and immigrants) is less likely to occur or less likely to go smoothly if majority and minority culture members differ in their perceptions of the values that are important for the larger dominant culture and the ethnic subcultures. The intersubjective cultural approach is thus potentially an ideal theoretical and methodological approach to identify these types of group status differences and examine their acculturation and intercultural consequences (Brown & Zagefka, 2011). Similarly, research on intergenerational value discrepancies (Phinney, Ong, & Madden, 2000) could also greatly benefit from using this approach.

Finally, given the recent debate in cross-cultural psychology about the utility of traditional value approaches to study culture (Schwartz, 2014), it is easy to see how the intersubjective cultural approach can provide some answers. Traditionally, aggregates of people’s self-reported personal values have been used as an indicator of a culture’s shared values and norms (e.g., Inglehart, 1997; Schwartz, 2004). The sharedness assumption was important because the higher the level of value consensus, the more strongly individuals’ value-relevant behavior is likely to be normatively mandated and appropriately rewarded and punished (Bond, 2013).

The finding that value ratings vary more between individuals than between countries (Fischer & Schwartz, 2011), however, has spurred a fruitful reexamination of two important interrelated issues: (a) the utility, if any, of using a country’s mean on self-reported values as measure of that country’s culture and (b) the validity of shared-meaning models of culture. Schwartz (2014) sees the lack of within-country value consensus as unambiguous proof that culture does not involve shared meaning, and thus, it must be something fully external to the individual, separate from people’s minds and the artifacts and institutions they jointly create. Morris (2014) contests these conclusions by making two observations: Individuals have other types of culture-relevant and culture-building types of shared meaning (from people’s understanding of the value concept itself to social axioms and more contextualized representations such as sacred norms); furthermore, cultural sharedness can also include phenomena such as conjointly owned and used resources and institutions, and coordinated action such as rituals and everyday cultural practices. Morris has also recently argued for a conceptualization of culture and cultural research that, rather than giving primacy to cultural difference, highlights how individuals and cultural systems incorporate elements from multiple cultural legacies (Morris, Chiu, & Liu, 2015).

In closing, in lieu of the recent debates regarding the utility of traditional value approaches to study culture and what culture is (Schwartz, 2014), the intersubjective cultural approach provides some important answers: Culture arises from the coordinated perceptions among people that a particular norm is important rather than from individuals’ personal beliefs regarding their importance. As such, the intersubjective approach promises to continue advancing the psychological study of cultural values and norms. Furthermore, given my previous points regarding the role of personal and intersubjective representations in (multi)cultural identity dynamics (including BII) and intergroup relations, the approach is also ideally suited to begin to answer questions regarding cultural change and interculturalism (Morris et al., 2015), both issues of critical importance in our increasingly complex and dynamic social world.