“For a Westerner, the thought that you can find yourself is accompanied by, let me go travel on my own. And it's like, where do you think yourself is? You think you're going to find an Indiana Jones warehouse where they keep all the selves?”
Very Bad Wizards · Art & Philosophy · October 2026
Context
The hosts were discussing a classic cross-cultural study showing that Americans tend to see the person as autonomous and context-free, while others describe people through their roles and relationships. Tamler Sommers tied it to his own work on cultures of honor.
Transcript
Yes, which could account for some of these differences. Which,
…stuff is not like hugely meaningful to me in terms of how much I believe it. But it did, the results are pretty strong. And I feel like there's a lot of other studies out there to show that we're about Americans, you know, that Americans have this more like the autonomous conception of the person.
I mean, we've talked about this. I'm almost positive at some point multiple times. Yeah. And even just the notion that you can go find yourself. And for like a Westerner, the thought that you can find yourself is like accompanied by like, let me go travel on my own. And it's like, where do you think yourself is? Like, what do you think? You think you're going to find like an Indiana Jones warehouse where they keep all the selves?
Yeah, we talked about this when I was doing the honor book. And, you know, like, I think we did an episode on that. And we did an episode on, you know, cultures of dignity versus culture of honor. And this was the exact same thing. It's like cultures of honor and collectivist cultures. They think…
our Western ideas have leafed
the other cultures. That's what Schwader thinks anyway. So Schwader quotes Geertz saying, the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a…
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