There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<p class="first" id="d1544340e91">In a seminal theory piece, Weisz and colleagues
argued that control over one's environment
was less attainable and desirable in Japan than in America. Subsequently, many scholars
have extrapolated from this argument to claim broad-based cultural differences in
control: that Western/individualist cultures perceive and desire more personal control
over their environment than do Eastern/collectivist cultures. Yet surprisingly little
empirical research has put this claim to the test. To test this notion, in Study 1
we examined perceived control over one's life in 38 nationally representative samples
( N = 48,951). In Study 2, we measured desire for control in community samples across
27 nations ( N = 4,726). Together, the studies show lower levels of perceived and
desired control in Japan than in any other nation. Over and above the Japan effect,
there was no evidence for differences in perceived or desired control between individualist
and collectivist nations, or between holistic and nonholistic nations.
</p>