Asian Journal of
Social Psychology (2013),
16, 142–151
Two faces of
interdependence: Harmony seeking and
rejection
avoidance
Hirofumi Hashimoto1 and Toshio
Yamagishi2
1Department of Social
Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The
University of Tokyo, and
2Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa
University, Tokyo, Japan
We argue that the current concept
of interdependent self-construal as ‘harmony seeking’ has overlooked a strategic
aspect of interdependence, which we term ‘rejection avoidance’. Using newly
constructed scales of interdependent self-construal, one for harmony seeking
and one for rejection avoidance, we find that Japanese respondents showed lower
independence and higher rejection avoidance than Americans, while no cultural difference
was found in harmony seeking. These findings explain why past efforts to
demonstrate cultural differences in interdependent self-construal using
self-report measures exclusively focusing on the harmony seeking aspect have
failed.
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