Objective Self-Awareness Essay

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The sum of beliefs, values, language, and other aspects in a society when passed down from one generation to another is known as culture. Culture is an idea very present in our daily lives, as we often come across ourselves surrounded by people from a variety of backgrounds.This is especially common in a country like the U.S. with a history of immigration and cultural diversity. Culture variation is defined as the difference in behavior and customs between cultures and how cultures differ from one another. In the study, “Mirrors in the Head: Cultural Variation in Objective Self-Awareness” by Heine et al. the idea of Objective Self-Awareness (OSA) is presented as the act of looking at your own image as you take perspective and analyze yourself. …show more content…

The authors discern Japanese culture from Westerner culture by analyzing one’s self-awareness between these two societies. It is shown that the Japanese are constantly looking at themselves from the society’s perspective (third-person perspective) or in a state of Objective Self-Awareness at all times. On the other hand, North Americans were stimulated to enter a state of OSA only when they are facing a stimulus that increases their self-awareness, such as looking at themselves in the mirror or hearing their own voice in a recorded tape. This discrepancy on how people look at themselves and analyze their self is pointed by the authors to be the cause of contrasting results in the study. According to the previous understanding of North American and Japanese culture on self-awareness, the authors hypothesized that Japanese should be less influenced by stimuli to enter a state of OSA, when compared to the likelihood of North

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