how connection developsAccepting help, following a family tradition, and putting a group's interests first can all be things a person willingly chooses. In their 2003 paper on autonomy and cultural practices, Valery Chirkov, Richard Ryan, Youngmee Kim, and Ulas Kaplan placed that willingness at the center of autonomy. Their distinction makes room for a person to rely on others and remain an active participant in the life they share.
The authors were addressing a disagreement about whether autonomy matters across cultures. Some researchers had treated it as independence or individualism, then questioned its importance in settings where family obligations and collective interests receive greater emphasis. Chirkov and colleagues argued that these concepts describe different things. Independence concerns how much someone relies on others. Individualism concerns the emphasis placed on personal interests and identity. Autonomy, as defined in self-determination theory, concerns whether people stand behind what they do.
That difference changes how an apparently similar action can be understood. Someone may welcome a parent's guidance because they trust the parent's judgment and find the advice useful. Someone else may follow the same advice because disagreement brings pressure they find difficult to withstand. Looking only at whether the advice was followed would miss the difference in their experience.
The reasons behind a commitment
The paper describes several ways people come to participate in practices around them. At one end, a person acts to obtain a reward or avoid punishment. The reason remains tied to what someone else will do. A person can also feel driven by guilt, shame, or the need for approval. Here, the pressure has become partly internal, although the action may still feel like something they must do to be acceptable.
Other forms of motivation involve greater personal endorsement. A person may recognize an activity as important and worthwhile, even when it is demanding. They may also have considered alternatives and found that the commitment fits their values and the life they want to lead. The authors described internalization as the process of taking in the practices and values around us. That process can remain incomplete, with guilt or approval doing much of the work, or develop into a commitment someone accepts as their own.
This account allows for effort and obligation. Caring for someone can take time and require giving up something enjoyable while remaining a commitment the caregiver values. Equally, performing a socially valued act does not establish that it feels willingly chosen. A commitment may be demanding and willingly chosen at the same time. Enjoying every part of it is different from valuing what it means.
Nor does acting independently settle the question. A person may feel compelled to demonstrate self-reliance because dependence is disapproved of. Doing everything alone can then be governed by pressure, just as accepting help can express considered choice. In the authors' framework, autonomy concerns the quality of motivation across both situations.
Different ways of living together
To investigate these distinctions, the researchers surveyed 559 university students in South Korea, Russia, Turkey, and the United States about practices associated with four cultural orientations. These combined the distinction between individual and collective interests with another distinction between equality and hierarchy.
Practices described as horizontal individualism emphasized personal direction without a focus on ranking above others. Horizontal collectivism included cooperation, sharing, helping relatives, and considering friends' ideas. Vertical individualism emphasized competition and outperforming others. Vertical collectivism involved duties, sacrifice, and deference to the group. These were categories of practices, rather than four fixed types of person.
For each practice, students rated reasons ranging from external demands and internal pressure to personal importance and considered acceptance. The researchers combined these ratings into a measure of relative autonomy. Students separately rated how likely they were to engage in the practices and how common and important those practices seemed in their country. Separating those questions was essential. A cultural expectation can be familiar and widely followed without being personally endorsed by everyone who encounters it.
The students' descriptions showed recognizable cultural differences. South Korean participants saw their surroundings as more collectivistic than US or Russian participants did. US students perceived more individualism, while Russian students described a mixture. The measures of perceived cultural practices did not work comparably in the Turkish sample, so the researchers did not include Turkey in those direct cultural comparisons. The researchers judged the relative-autonomy measure sufficiently comparable to examine it across all four samples.
Within those settings, endorsement varied. Students living in the same country differed in how willingly they adopted its practices. The country someone came from could therefore provide context without supplying an answer about what that particular person valued.
Willing participation and wellbeing
Across all four samples, greater autonomy in adopting cultural practices was associated with greater wellbeing. The researchers combined life satisfaction, self-esteem, self-actualization, and depressive symptoms into a measure of wellbeing. Their outcome concerned how people experienced their lives and themselves, rather than how close they felt to particular people. The association appeared for individualistic and collectivistic practices, including both their horizontal and vertical forms.
That pattern is the central contribution of the study. The relationship between autonomy and wellbeing was not confined to practices emphasizing the individual. Students who more willingly endorsed collective practices also tended to report greater wellbeing. The analyses did not detect a significant difference in this relationship by country or gender. That supported its relevance across the groups studied, while leaving room for differences a study of this size might not detect.
The researchers also examined whether participants' own tendency toward individualistic or collectivistic behavior altered the association. They found no significant evidence that it did. In that analysis, a greater reported likelihood of engaging in collectivistic behavior also had a small positive association with wellbeing. An interest in collective life and a sense of willing participation were compatible parts of the findings.
The questionnaires captured motivation and wellbeing at one point in time. People with greater wellbeing might also have experienced their actions as more autonomous, so the direction of the relationship remained open. And these university samples represented only part of life in each country. Within that scope, willingness was relevant across different cultural settings and different kinds of commitment.
Equality, hierarchy, and personal endorsement
Some practices were more readily internalized than others. Across the samples, the average relative-autonomy score was substantially higher for horizontal practices than for vertical ones. Cooperation among people regarded as equals and self-direction without competitive ranking appeared easier to accept as one's own than the particular hierarchy-oriented practices included in the study.
The authors interpreted this pattern in relation to the opportunities different practices provide for autonomy and relatedness. A group can ask for cooperation while recognizing members as people whose views and interests matter. A practice organized around submission or outperforming others may place different pressures on participation. This was the researchers' explanation of the pattern, rather than an experimental demonstration of how a particular group arrangement changes motivation.
The results also contained details that resist a simple cultural ranking. US students generally showed comparatively low internalization of the practices assessed, including especially low endorsement of vertical practices. Living in a country described as individualistic did not make people uniformly more autonomous in these activities. And, across the combined sample, individualistic practices were more internalized on average than collectivistic ones within both the horizontal and vertical categories. That result coexisted with the finding that autonomous participation in either kind of practice was associated with wellbeing.
The wording of the practices helps explain the scope of this comparison. Some vertical items involved doing something a person disliked to please family, giving up an enjoyable activity because family disapproved, or becoming tense when someone else performed better. These particular demands differ from willingly relying on someone's expertise or accepting responsibility for others. The authors acknowledged that other hierarchical practices might be more readily accepted. Their result concerned the practices they asked about, not every possible form of authority or duty.
Having a say within a shared life
A shared life includes commitments people make because they care about one another. Seeking advice, contributing to a group, or keeping a family tradition may express something a person values deeply. In the authors' account, autonomy makes room for that kind of involvement. The person's own reasons give the commitment its meaning.
This distinction leaves room to be curious about how others want to take part. A person may welcome guidance in one decision and want to make another independently. They may value a tradition while preferring a different role in it. Asking what they value and what they would like to contribute gives them a say in the arrangement. The shared activity remains shared, with room for each person to describe what makes it worthwhile.
Sources
Chirkov, V. I., Ryan, R. M., Kim, Y., & Kaplan, U. (2003). Differentiating autonomy from individualism and independence: A self-determination theory perspective on internalization of cultural orientations and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 97–110. Read the full paper.