Compare the major components of the two theories of human development and describe which theory best explains the influence of culture on human development and why.

Theories of Human Development
Various theories of human development exist within the field of psychology, although the role of culture differs among them. Some theories are considered universal and, thus, assume that an individual will develop similarly regardless of the culture in which he or she is raised. Yet, other theories assume that the developmental niche or ecological context of the individual has more of an influence on the individual. For example, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development assumes that everyone reaches the final stage of cognition regardless of his or her culture. In contrast, Brofenbrenner’s ecological systems theory suggests that culture is influential in human development.
For this Discussion, select two major theories of human development that interest you. Consider the similarities and differences in how these theories explain cultural influences on human development.
With these thoughts in mind:
Post by Day 4 a brief description of the two theories of human development that you selected. Then, compare the major components of the two theories. Finally, describe which theory best explains the influence of culture on human development and why. Support your responses using the Learning Resources and the current literature
References

Article: Furnham, A., & Fukumoto, S. (2008). Japanese parents’ estimates of their own and their children’s multiple intelligences: Cultural modesty and moderate differentiation. Japanese Psychological Research, 50(2), 63–76.
Retrieved from the Walden Library using the Academic Search Complete database.
Article: Smith, M. K. (2008). Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences. Retrieved from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm
Article: Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (2004). Why we need to explore development in its cultural context Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 50(3), 369–386.
Retrieved from the Walden Library using the Academic Search Complete database.
Article: Tsethlikai, M. (2011). An exploratory analysis of American Indian children’s cultural engagement, fluid cognitive skills, and standardized verbal IQ scores. Developmental Psychology, 47(1), 192–202. Retrieved from the Walden Library using the PsycARTICLES database.
Article: Uichol, K., & Young-Shin, P. (2006). Indigenous psychological analysis of academic achievement in Korea: The influence of self-efficacy, parents, and culture. International Journal of Psychology, 41(4), 287–292.
Retrieved from the Walden Library using the Academic Search Complete database.
Media
Video: Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2007). Culture and psychology: Culture and human development. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Transcript of media

Culture and Human Development Program Transcript
NARRATOR: All human beings develop in a cultural context. And that context shapes how they develop, from their sense of self to the choices they make. In this video program, doctors Hazel Rose Markus, Shinobu Kitayama, and Steven Heine discuss the influence of culture on aspects of human development, including intelligence.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Oh, it’s great to be here– SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Oh, very nice to see you. STEVEN HEINE: Oh, yeah. Great to see you.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: –to have a conversation about culture and development. I think development is one of those areas of psychology that there are so many important ideas. It’s so central to everything about psychology.
STEVEN HEINE: How people become people.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: That’s it. It’s really at the core. And there have been so many important contributions.
You think about Piaget. You think about Kohlberg. Those theories– everybody uses those theories. It’s interesting to think about, though. Piaget– how did he come to his conclusions? What did he base his theory on?
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Well, he observed his own child– HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: That’s right. That’s right.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: –and developed his theory. And I think it’s a very, very interesting intellectual exercise to imagine what the theory might have looked like if Piaget was African or Asian, or he should have observed some [INAUDIBLE].
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: I think that’s right. He’s there looking at his kids, doing what a good scientist would do. Careful observation study. Remarkable observations and generalizations that he made, but I think he probably thought he was observing development, human nature, unfolding, developing. And he charted it very carefully.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: But from the very beginning of life, human behavior is shaped so much by cultural practices. Just for example, sleeping arrangement is very, very different.
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STEVEN HEINE: Oh, that’s a great example. We just had a baby in Canada, and we did what parents in Canada do. First thing we do is we take it home. We set up a room for it. It had its own room.
Put it in a crib separate from our bedroom. I imagine that’s probably not the way– SHINOBU KITAYAMA: That seems very cruel.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: It seems like child abuse, in a lot of the world, is what I’ve come to real– I did that, too, for my daughter. It was the right thing because, what are you trying to do as a parent? You’re trying to help your kid on the road to becoming the right kind of child, a good kid.
STEVEN HEINE: They’re becoming their own person. Giving them their own space.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Their own space. STEVEN HEINE: Let them develop their own needs.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: In Japan, for example, I slept with my parents in the same room. Separate futon–
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: But all in one space?
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: All in one space. And that seems to be a very important part for human beings in general. No? You don’t think so?
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Well, it’s clear that there’s different ideas, different tasks or different theories about what we’re supposed to do in development. Or different cultural contexts have different ideas. I think Americans have this idea, or at least miIDle-class Americans, I should say, often have this idea that you want to build an independent baby.
So you take this very dependent baby. And you don’t want the baby to be too dependent because how can they grow up and do what you have to do in this world. So as you say, we both put our babies in their bed. You’re down there looking at them all the time or have the baby monitor on to make sure, but it’s part of– and I think what’s interesting about it as a parent you just do this. It just seems the right thing to do. And then you come along and say, oh, that seems mean.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Yeah. I think, as a parent, you just do what you are told to do. Or you just do how your parents treated you. But those practices seem to reflect some ideas about what’s the ideal way of being in the world.
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Maybe you are saying that the American cultural context or maybe Swiss cultural context to be independent is a good thing. But in many other parts of the world, social relationship’s so important to be connected and to be attached to some surrounding situation, including important people. That’s such an important thing.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: The baby. The different idea is the idea that the baby comes into the world as asocial and the task from an interdependent cultural perspective then is to take that asocial baby and help that baby become an interdependent or relational being.
STEVEN HEINE: And I think an important point about this too is just thinking of this baby coming into this world. And the baby doesn’t have these ideas about independence or interdependence and that they’re not innate in it. They’re not part of it.
It learns these ideas and we help provide these ideas by providing a cultural environment that this baby interacts with. And it learns these ideas through growing up. They don’t just unfold naturally. They come out through the experiences.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: This idea of independence or idea of interdependence is a funny thing. Often, we can think about those ideas, but those ideas are really in the world in a way. Ways in which we treat each other, that could be independent, could be interdependent. How can we make sense of this?
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Well, that’s one of the important points, I think, about cultural psychology is the recognition that the psychological is always cultural. The culture is not separate from the psychology. It’s part and parcel of the psychological. And one of the amazing things about humans is that you actually need the cultural context to become a person.
STEVEN HEINE: And certainly, we come into this world with very few instincts in this way. We come into this world very helpless. We have this extremely long period of socialization, unlike any other animal. There’s many, many years where we require caretakers to teach us things, to teach us this cultural information that we need to learn to be able to survive and to thrive.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Right. That’s right. Humans are cultural animals. Biologically, humans are prepared to observe, to attune themselves to cultural surroundings. And this happens all the time. It’s life long.
STEVEN HEINE: That’s right. So we have this potential that we come into this world to learn one of many different kinds of cultural systems. That we could be socialized to learn how to be a peasant farmer in the steppes of Ukraine or to become a banker on Wall Street. That we come to learn these cultural worlds
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through the ways we interact with our environments, with the people in our environments, our families, with the relationships [INAUDIBLE].
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: All of those are important cultural contexts, I think. And we’re just beginning now in psychology to study them. So of course, national origin– are you Japanese? Are you Mexican?
Where were you born? Where did you grow up? And we’ve done, I think, some of the most work in figuring out the patterns that are associated with those contexts. But if you think about it, we’re all very, very multicultural.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Especially in American society, there are so many ethnic groups and very different cultural contexts. And generally–
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Well, not only ethnicity. Gender– think about gender. Think about religion. Think about your neighborhood.
STEVEN HEINE: Social class.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Social class.
STEVEN HEINE: If you live in an urban neighborhood or a rural neighborhood. Your group of friends.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: The West Coast, East Coast.
STEVEN HEINE: Your families. Very specific cultural contexts that we come to encounter.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I know one very interesting study. Typically, in American cultural contexts, which emphasize independence of self, you tend to describe yourself in very, very personal trait terms. I’m smart, I’m wonderful, and so on.
But there are some studies indicating the tremendous within cultural variation. So just think about Asian Americans. Some Asian Americans identify themselves with the mainstream American culture. Sometimes those people are even more American than white Americans are. And I think that’s fascinating.
Depending on your attitude toward mainstream culture, yourself can change. And yet, your Asian ethnicity-oriented culture still exists.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Absolutely. There’s so many sources of these ideas about what kind of a person should I be. What’s the right way to be a person? And I think when you look in these contexts, whatever your context is, your national origin context or your neighborhood or your family, they are giving you messages about what’s the right way to be a person.
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And I think so far, some of the work has looked at differences between what we started talking about, like this idea that the self should be an independent being. Should be somewhat separate from others. Shouldn’t be too influenced by others. This is the idea that’s common in lots of many, many American contexts, particularly miIDle-class American contexts.
The self is a bundle of attributes of traits, of preferences. And the right way to be is to try to express those in my behavior. And I shouldn’t let you infringe on these.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I came to the United States for the first time 20 years ago. I was just amazed and shocked to hear somebody say, which wine do you like?
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Oh, you mean when you come for dinner? SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Oh, yes.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: No, I was being nice. That’s like saying, what would you like to drink? Do you want beer? Do you want wine? You want tea? Juice?
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Well, next time I decided to say, oh, I like Chardonnay. HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: That’s a good answer.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: That’s a script. Cultural script–
STEVEN HEINE: You learned a cultural script.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I have to follow, but of course, I ended up liking Chardonnay anyway.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: But you should know. You should have a preference. Yeah, well, that’s how it happens.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: But that’s how human preference, for example, can be developed. Preference is not natural.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: So from a more interdependent way, the right thing that I should have done as a host is said, oh, Shinobu is coming for dinner. Let me think about what he would like to drink. I’ve eaten lunch and dinner with him before.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I think there’s a cultural assumption about shared knowledge. That may be a fiction. And yet, there’s some shared assumption that you know what I like and vice versa.
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HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Well, I do. But I feel from an American perspective that I have a good guess what you like, but I wouldn’t want to take away your opportunity to choose because I know it’s very important. That’s how you can express your preference.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: It’s my natural right to choose.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: That’s your right. And that’s this idea, very American idea, that comes from our history, from our philosophy, the idea that what is a person? A person is a bundle of natural rights. And the right way to be a person is you have a right to express what you may be feeling.
STEVEN HEINE: And these ideas we learn very early that as a parent that’s– I read the parenting books. And they’re saying that the right way to raise a child is to always give them a choice. If you want to say, put on your shoes, you don’t say that. You say, would you like to put on your red shoes or your blue shoes? And it’s always a matter of providing a choice and providing them with a sense of control over agency.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Oh, you remember the example? I can remember once when Shinobu and I were first starting a research project and he came to visit me. And my daughter was, I don’t know, 4 or 5 at that time. And I did the morning thing for lots of parents.
I pulled out three different kinds of cereals and put them on the counter. And then I asked her, did you want cereal? Or I could make some eggs this morning. And then how about juice– orange juice or apple juice?
And Shinobu was sitting there, and we’re getting ready to go to the office. And he says–
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I thought that’s hysterical.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: You did. I couldn’t think, what is so funny? This is a breakfast script? And you said to me, why are you giving her all those things to choose like that?
Why? What is more natural? What is more important than for her to have the experience of getting to choose her breakfast? And then she knows what she likes. And I never thought about until you asked me the question.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I think that’s a very interesting example because breakfast, clearly– I think it’s clear– that breakfast is universal. And yet, breakfast is not breakfast, really, in a way because just exactly what is brought in to make breakfast possible–
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HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: It has different meanings. SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Very different meanings.
STEVEN HEINE: But I think an important point is that what you thought that seemed the natural way of doing things and what seems natural is the way that people around you are doing things. And so as a psychologist, you’re going to start building theories about the natural way that people develop, that they need these choices.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Like Piaget. That’s what he did.
STEVEN HEINE: Exactly. By observing your children just like Piaget did. And it’s not until you have people from different cultures coming together and you start seeing this contrast of what you think is natural is what you think is strange, just start to realize, wow, the way people develop and become fully functioning agents is going to be dependent on the cultural meanings that they embrace.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: I remember you said that that’s not how breakfast goes in your house. And you just had this idea that you would just know what your daughter would like for breakfast. And much as when you were a host–
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Even when I don’t think I know perfectly well, I do my best to prepare the best possible breakfast. And sometimes it is reasonable to make an assumption and the daughter knows that that’s my intention because that’s how cultural assumption is.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: So you’re fostering on the relationship.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Right. More relational. Mutual understanding or some presumption about shared knowledge.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: And you’re figuring out what she needs and wants. And you assume that she’s understanding that she should be paying attention to what you expect for her, what you want.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Right. That’s right. So I provide her with my own way of breakfast. And the assumption in my mind– I believe implicitly that my child will appreciate it. And kids in turn know that that’s my only attitude so that when I offer the meal to her, she will understand that that’s how I’m doing it so that now she will begin to appreciate it, at least compelled to appreciate it.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: See how much is built into– it’s amazing. Until someone asks you something– like you did– why are you doing breakfast this way, I didn’t think of it. But there’s all of these ideas and understandings that are packed into the minimal little start of the day.
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And then I remember after you said that, then I took her to the preschool. And I realized we go in there and get ready for the day. And the first thing, she’s greeted by a teacher at preschool who says, what do you want to do this morning? And gave her a choice. The room was arranged with seven different activities.
And so she could either read. She could color. She could do the computer table. She could do puzzles.
She could do dress up. And once again, I’m sure the preschool teachers– as I was doing in breakfast– they were thinking what’s important in development, in building the right kind of kid who will work well in American context is to give her a chance to choose what she wants to do. She knows.
And so I thought, this is another way the world has this assumption that people are choosers. And let’s arrange the world with lots of choices. And then people are constituted or shaped in that way.
STEVEN HEINE: Yeah, but choices don’t matter so much in many other contexts. And this reminds me of a very interesting study done by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper where they provided kindergarten-aged children with a task that the child either got to make the choice for themself or their mother made a choice for them or the experimenter made a choice for them. And they watched to see, well, how long are the kids going to play with this task? How much do they like the task? And the American pattern was that the kids liked the task more and played with it more when they made the choice for themself.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: And all American educators, I think, assumed that that’s the way to get motivation in the class, right? You give kids some choice.
STEVEN HEINE: Everything should be based on personal choice.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: How come, though, Asian kids work so hard when mom chooses the task?
STEVEN HEINE: Well, because if you identify with your mother here, and you trust your mother, and you have a strong relationship with your mother, and you’re interested in connecting with your mother so you want to do the kinds of things, I think, that [INAUDIBLE].
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I see. So it’s some kind of a relational identification. Mom’s opinion and your opinion. Mom is caring about you.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Yeah. I think you experience it as wind in your sails, a sort of scaffolding for you. American kids, I think, often feel because they share the task that parents have as well as being independent, they think if the mom
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says, oh, I know you’ll like to work on this kind of puzzle, honey. It’s like, oh, what? I don’t–
STEVEN HEINE: It takes away your autonomy.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: And it’s not fun anymore.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: It’s interfering–
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: With my independence.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: –with individual freedom. But Asian kids might experience the same kind of thing as a kind of scaffolding or support or caring.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: The person who knows you best cares about you is looking out for your interests, which, of course, that’s what American parents are doing, too. But we’re doing it with this idea of the goal is that the child should experience herself as independent and an autonomous agent. And I think our students at Stanford have done some studies where we just asked them something simple about who chose your major. And at Stanford, there are many, many Asian American students. And we find there’s a really powerful difference in the European American students.
They will say, who chose my major? Are you kiIDing? Me. I chose my major, of course.
East Asian American students will tell us, my mom, my parents, my teacher. Very, very likely to say that other people chose my major, helped me choose my major.
And I think from Americans’ perspective, it’s, what? It’s like my breakfast. I choose my cereal and I choose my major.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: So in the Asian case, that’s an expression that I am an Asian. That is embeIDed in this relationship, important relationship. I am a relational being. That’s what they are trying to say by saying that my mom chose my major.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: I’m doing the right thing from an interdependent perspective. I’m kind of meet the expectations, my obligations, what my roles are. In fact, I think–
STEVEN HEINE: And this highlights, I think, just how people understand their selves and their identities in such different ways. It sounds like for Asian Americans here, a very important part of their self and they think about, who am
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I? What kind of person am I? It’s these relationships that I have with others. The roles that I have in this relationship.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Yeah. I think that shows up very, very vividly in Twenty Statements Tests, self-description tests. When sometimes we ask people just to describe themselves in 20 different ways.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Oh, college students, they say, I mean– SHINOBU KITAYAMA: It’s just amazing.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: I’m friendly. I’m happy. I’m optimistic. I like to play Frisbee. I’m a nice person.
STEVEN HEINE: These are all internal psychological traits. They are also positive ones.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Positive and traits. And just–
STEVEN HEINE: And they’re things that you take with you. They are parts of the person inside them. So when you go to another context, you still are all those things. They take them from situation to situation.
But I think when you’re focusing on relationships and roles that make you up, then these are things that are bound to the relational context. That you move to a different relational context, a different aspect of yourself is salient. And you can feel like a different person in different contexts.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I think it was a nice study by Steve Cousins that show that Japanese certainly use those trait terms. Japanese are less positive. And yet, they do use trait terms. But whenever they use trait terms, they tend to qualify. I’m lazy at home, but I’m very diligent in school, for example. That kind of inconsistency, seemingly inconsistent statement seems entirely reasonable.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Because the situation is what determines how you’re going to be.
STEVEN HEINE: And that poses a real challenge for studying the self-concept because we develop many methods, Western methods and Western contexts, where we assume that self is a constant fixed entity. And so it doesn’t really matter where you study it, what context you study it, it will always appear the same. But if you’re describing in these other cultural contexts that it can appear and manifest differently in different contexts then, well, how do we study this?
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: But you can see Piaget’s problem. You don’t see this when you’re just observing your own children. It just seems so natural. It’s only
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when you start to have somebody ask you questions, somebody who’s been part of other contexts. Or you travel and have other–
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: It’s interesting you brought Piaget back because this really sheds some light on very different ideas of intelligence itself. Intelligence is often regarded as a thing, which is impacting your head [INAUDIBLE] constant and stable.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Well, I think that makes sense, thinking of your different theory of what the person is. That sort of sets it up. If you think a person’s independent, as we’ve been talking about, that’s common in European American context. You think of a person as more interdependent, which seems to be a theory or idea or model that’s more common in most of the rest of the world. But that’s going to change how you think about almost everything.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think if you have more interdependent notion of the self, even something like intelligence may be seen as much more malleable, changeable. And this does have real consequences.
STEVEN HEINE: And the independent view of the self, then, is going to be much more stable and have theories of intelligence that are stable. And then measuring intelligence becomes a very important concern. We can measure it in a child because that tells us something about the kind of person they’re going to be because this is a stable theory.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: As something inside the person. That’s the idea that development of– if you’re going to look at development, it must be some unfolding of what’s inside the person’s biological maturation.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: It’s just fascinating just to remind ourselves that this very notion of intelligence as a stable trait [INAUDIBLE] thing, which is measurable, was a very recent idea, which really was highlighted in recent psychological literature invented in England, Protestant cultural region.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: White Europeans who devised the test and then they say what the right answers are. And then how you do on that test determines whether you’re smart or not. But you have to always ask yourself, who made that test? Who came up with the questions and the determination?
STEVEN HEINE: But that test still influences the ways that we think about intelligence, the ways that we design tests now. So to get into a university in the US, you need to take the SAT test, which is modeled after some of those original tests. And the idea– and it turns out it’s not true– but the idea is that the SATs should measure some aptitudes, some aptitude that aren’t going to be evident in your school work.
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Turns out, you can influence how you score on these tests by studying. But the idea is that this should measure some pure essence of you. And in contrast, from what I understand with Japanese entrance exams, they’re not based on this kind of model. They’re based on you learn a lot of factual information, which requires an awful lot of study and memorization to learn things like who built the Suez Canal. And when was that built?
And to learn that kind of knowledge requires a lot of work, a lot of effort. It shows this theory of intelligence as something that’s malleable that you can increase–
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Yeah. Actually, that point is very interesting. When I was working for entrance exams many years ago in Japan, I didn’t understand exactly what this test is measuring. Maybe you’re right. That test is meant to measure your effort or your ability to be diligent.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: What’s that word that means time facing the desk? It’s very, very important. It’s a measure of just the amount of time you’ve put in. And I think these days the students say fail with four and pass with five in terms of how many hours of–
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: Well, I used to think that that’s stupid and crazy. But maybe if you buy into this assumption that intelligence is malleable, incremental, improvable, then it might make sense. That’s the point of measuring this fixed thing called intelligence. That very assumption could be wrong. And instead, you might measure improvability or you are impatient to improve on yourself, that might have real consequence.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: I think Americans have both theories. We know the theory that you can improve. And of course, part of the American dream that if you work hard, you can get to the top. But I think we basically believe that there’s people who have– or very many people believe– it’s a common theory to say if you have the right stuff, some people have the right stuff. And they’ll do well in that entity.
SHINOBU KITAYAMA: I think that ideology becomes very problematic– or it’s OK as long as you are succeeding.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Yeah. Exactly.
STEVEN HEINE: Well, the goal becomes you have to find out what is your right stuff. And you go try out things. And if you’re not doing well, it indicates, well, this is not your right stuff. You have to try something else.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: See, that goes back to why I think Americans just think, of course, they have to choose their major because they have to find their passion so that will be–
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STEVEN HEINE: Find your calling.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Find their calling, very much part of the Protestant ethic, part of the heritage of this nation. Regardless of our religion– Jewish or BuIDhist or Catholic– we’re all Protestants because it’s very important that this idea about finding your calling, control, responsibility is very much–
STEVEN HEINE: And I think these different theories of intelligence that people have affect the ways that we respond to the kind of feedback that we get. So we all encounter feedback. We’re either doing well at something or doing poorly at something as we go through our lives. And that’s going to affect you differently depending on what you think the nature of intelligence is. So we’ve done this one study together where–
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS: Oh, yeah. That’s a good illustration. SHINOBU KITAYAMA: That’s a fun study.
STEVEN HEINE: –where we were comparing American students and Japanese students. And we had them take this test. And we rigged this test so that they either got a really easy version of the test or a difficult version of the test. And then we left them alone in a room with another set of items, another task related to that test to see what they would do.
And if you remember, remarkably, what we