American selves: Understanding the roles of agency and communion.

Abstract

What is the nature of the American self in the 1990s? What domains or areas of life do individuals in this country focus on as being central or core to their self-concepts? In this dissertation, I address these questions, with particular attention to the role the two forces of agency (a desire to be separate and to achieve individual goals and desires) vs. communion (a motivation to merge with others and to foster close relationships) play within the self-concepts of American respondents. In examining the self-concepts of a representative sample of 1471 individuals in the metropolitan Detroit area, a surprisingly strong emphasis on communal aspects of the self was discovered, given theoretical emphasis on the primarily agentic nature of the American self. This emphasis on communal aspects of the self was equally strong in all sociocultural groups. Upon further investigation, though, these communal aspects of the self did not seem strongly related to other aspects of respondents' lives. Although communal aspects of the self were related to positive outcomes in the domain of close relationships, positive outcomes in nine other life domains and in overall well-being were more closely tied to agentic aspects of the self. It is possible that individuals must fulfill the cultural mandate by emphasizing agentic aspects of their self-concepts in order to achieve well-being in American society. However, it is also possible that researchers lack the vocabulary and the tools to assess the less goal-oriented well-being which may be associated with communal aspects of the self.