title: Culture and the role of choice in agency.
abstract: Three cross-cultural studies conducted among U.S. and Indian adults compared perceptions of helping friends in strongly versus weakly expected cases, views of helping family versus strangers, and responses to a self-determination motivation scale. Expectations to help family and friends were positively correlated with satisfaction and choice only among Indians and not among Americans. Also, whereas U.S. respondents associated lesser satisfaction and choice with strongly versus weakly socially expected helping, Indian respondents associated equal satisfaction and choice with the 2 types of cases. Providing evidence of the importance of choice in collectivist cultures, the results indicate that social expectations to meet the needs of family and friends tend to be more fully internalized among Indians than among Americans. Methodologically, the results also highlight the need to incorporate items that tap more internalized meanings of role-related social expectations on measures of motivation in the tradition of self-determination theory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, NY 10011, USA. millerj@newschool.edu
authors.forename: Joan G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Rekha
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Das
authors.forename: Sharmista
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chakravarthy
mesh_terms: D002605:Character; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005190:Family / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology; D006379:Helping Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007206:Individuality; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D010865:Pilot Projects; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012056:Reinforcement, Social; D012380:Role; D012933:Social Identification; D012941:Social Responsibility; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult