The universality of psychological autonomy across cultures: Arguments from developmental and social psychology

Abstract

This chapter addresses a long debated problem of universality of psychological autonomy across cultures. The author defines autonomy and articulates its three components - life goals and moral rules, affective and sensual demands, and social norms and expectations, and three levels of processing these components - awareness/mindfulness, reflectivity, and decision making. He states that sense of self, which function at two levels: a core experiential pre-reflective self and an autobiographical, narrative, and reflected self, constitutes the center of autonomous functioning of every human being. He uses arguments from developmental, social, and cultural psychology to validate his position that human autonomy is a culturally universal phenomenon. Autonomy requires for its development a socio-cultural environment, thus, everywhere where there are meaningful social interactions mediated by language it may emerge. The author also differentiates cultural models and ideologies of independent/individualistic versus interdependent/collectivistic selves from a first-person, perspectival self that initiates and regulates autonomous functioning and discusses the consequences of confusion between these understandings.