An Interdependent Approach: Manifestations in Cultural Practices

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we elaborated on the interdependent mode of happiness. We sought to provide conceptual constructs, theoretical exploration, and empirical support. In this chapter, we extend that discussion to the larger puzzle of culture. In doing so, we return to questions raised in Chap. 2: the relationship between ‘micro’ self-construal and ‘macro’ contexts. How does an interdependent mode manifest in the larger cultural patterns? What sorts of alternative cultural practices does an interdependent approach give rise to? How do cultural practices help reinforce or, in some cases, challenge dominant patterns? In line with the discussions thus far, we focus on three specific cultural domains: measurement, education, and social capital. In doing so, we link cultural psychology’s focus on modes of self-construal with larger patterns of social-construal, traditionally the domain of social sciences disciplines like sociology. This further extends the interdisciplinarity of the last chapter, showing how psychology, philosophy, and social science—or at least the culturally aware communities within these broad academic fields—come to be mutually reinforcing. This combined micro and macro approach is a crucial synthetic perspective necessary for understanding the future of happiness and well-being.

In the previous chapter, we elaborated on the interdependent mode of happiness. We sought to provide conceptual constructs, theoretical exploration, and empirical support. In this chapter, we extend that discussion to the larger puzzle of culture. In doing so, we return to questions raised in Chap. 2: the relationship between ‘micro’ self-construal and ‘macro’ contexts. How does an interdependent mode manifest in the larger cultural patterns? What sorts of alternative cultural practices does an interdependent approach give rise to? How do cultural practices help reinforce or, in some cases, challenge dominant patterns? In line with the discussions thus far, we focus on three specific cultural domains: measurement, education, and social capital. In doing so, we link cultural psychology’s focus on modes of self-construal with larger patterns of social-construal, traditionally the domain of social sciences disciplines like sociology. This further extends the interdisciplinarity of the last chapter, showing how psychology, philosophy, and social science—or at least the culturally aware communities within these broad academic fields—come to be mutually reinforcing. This combined micro and macro approach is a crucial synthetic perspective necessary for understanding the future of happiness and well-being.

Preliminary Considerations: Culture→Mind? Mind→Culture? or Culture⇔Mind?

In psychology, ‘psychological function’ is the term used to encompass the totality of how the mind ‘works’. Psychological functioning includes thinking and feeling, as well as motivation and behavior (action). These psychological functions are, at least to some extent, clearly subject to biological limitations. For example, thinking and feeling are limited by heredity effects on how brain and body function. Moreover, there are undoubtedly many commonalities in psychological functioning among humans worldwide. Nevertheless, the specific environment, circumstances, and personal experiences we undergo also have a significant effect on psychological function. Cultural psychology is one part of a much larger movement across the human sciences that has, in recent decades, shown the severe limitations of biological-heredity style, universalist explanations that dominated the first half of the twentieth century.

Among the specific environments and circumstances that impact psychological function, one element is culture. In the last chapter, we tentatively defined culture as “a pattern of values, thoughts, and reactions that has been developed and shared by a group of people throughout their social and group history”. The questions we now address are these: How is this culture transmitted, learned, and—once established—continually reinforced? As we shall see, cultural values and dispositions are transmitted at both the macro-level—for example, the political, economic, educational, religious, and linguistic scripts—prevailing in a given society, and at the meso-level—immediate relationships at school, home, work, and/or places of worship. Once a mutually reinforcing cycle of psychological function and cultural values is in place, people become involved in the maintenance of cultural practices simply by performing habitual acts. More accurately, habitual actions transmit such cultural values, while heretical acts work to transform them.

Within the wider ‘macro’ social sciences, this discussion has unfolded under the so-called structure versus agency debate. This debate has been particularly strong in Anglophone social science, where the predominant fault lines have been Marxism and Liberalism. Under a structuralist account, the wider structures of a given society limit the choices of the individual. This includes the constraints of social class, race, gender, education, religion, language, and so on. A Marxist account emphasizes the ways that structures impute economic power, and socialize individual ‘minds’ into ways of thinking that constrain their freedom. Theorists like Gramsci, Lukacs, and Althusser, mostly building on Engels, often utilize the term ‘false consciousness’ to describe these mistaken, ideological ways of thinking. In this account, ‘culture’ is seen as the key element of the ideological apparatus of control, and embraces the assumption that ‘culture’ shapes ‘mind’ unilaterally. Culture is a structure, imposed and hegemonic, that controls unwitting individuals.

In contrast, an agency account suggests that individuals have considerable autonomy, are far less constrained by wider social structures than imagined, and through their own abilities, intelligence, and action can change these wider social structures. This is, roughly speaking, the dominant view of Liberalism. By exercising human reason, the ‘minds’ of individuals can shape their larger environment, both social institutions and/or natural environments. Here the view is that ‘mind’ wholly shapes culture: the faculty of Reason is viewed, in these liberal accounts, as universal and the source of independence. When exercised properly, reason is not influenced by the prejudices of culture. Out of this a-cultural use of reason springs, of course, the universal claims of the Western Enlightenment, a social and political movement premised on the universality of reason and the individual agency it affords. In this way, Anglophone social sciences present us with a dichotomy: either culture shapes mind or mind shapes culture. We note, in passing, that recent debates in Continental Europe are somewhat richer and more nuanced, following poststructuralist challenges to a-cultural reason (Foucault among others) and greater reflexivity on the cultural contingency of such categories.

Cultural psychology takes a divergent approach, one emphasizing the “mutual constitution” of culture and self (Shweder, 1991). Markus and Kitayama (2010) here provides another useful visual conceptualization, as shown in Fig. 5.1. Here we may envisage how the ‘self’ is influenced by factors at various levels: from daily practices at the meso-level, to institutions and pervasive ideas at the macro-level. The notion of self here includes cognition, emotion, and motivation, but also perception (what becomes our focus) and action (what moves us). This self is formed by and forms the daily practices we find ourselves in. That is, the properties of ‘mind’ are created through participation in “everyday habits and realities” in familiar relationships, such as family, school, and workplace, where various concrete tasks are carried out and learned through repeated actions (Kitayama et al., 2009). In turn, these tasks constitute the larger linguistic, political, educational, legal, and media ‘scapes’ we find ourselves embedded within; the totality of customary and public semantic structures, folk theories, and symbols built up through the history of a society or group. And from these scapes come “cultural products” (Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008), which would include news articles, song lyrics, textbooks, children’s books and so on. All of these come back around to reinforce those dispositions in our selves.

Fig. 5.1

Mutual constitution of culture and selves. (Adapted from Markus & Kitayama, 2010)

At the most pervasive yet intangible level, larger factors such as economic patterns and environmental landscapes reinforce these patterns. A neo-liberal capitalist economy that exhorts individuals to increase the career prospects by acquiring higher skills (human capital stocks) and strategically building a unique skillset (e.g., the resume) produces a vastly different outlook than a gift-economy founded on reciprocal exchange as means of affirming solidarity (Mauss, 1898 [2000]). Cramped single family apartments in densely populated yet anonymous urban sprawls, as opposed to multigenerational homes in one’s ancestral home surrounded by intimate relations and nature, inevitably gives rise to very different emotional and perceptual experiences of the self.

Here too we may locate philosophical ideas, religious doctrines, and folk theories that are often shared, but rarely articulated. In the last chapter, we saw that modern Japanese philosophy emphasized that “the self cannot be determined without relations to the outside” (Nishida, 1932). Contrast that with Dewey’s observations that American individualism finds its ‘spiritual roots’ in Christianity. Philosophical and religious ideas such as these both shape and are shaped by the wider cultural milieu. Again, once the psychological processes are established, people consciously or unconsciously participate in the maintenance of acquired cultural practices through their participation in familiar collective phenomena, even something as mundane as non-verbal communication (e.g., a bow vs. a handshake) and/or acting together on a common task. Each loop or layer of the system works to keep the other in place, creating considerable inertia. That said, transformation can also occur, particularly when differences enter the milieu and are sustained over longer periods of time.

In this way, cultural psychology conceptualizes one’s mind (self) as not completely independent of social and cultural customs/products. Social and cultural customs/products do not, in turn, exist apart from one’s mind and actions. While this approach is at odds with dominant models in contemporary Anglophone social science, it is interesting to note that leading Western thinkers like John Dewey held a strikingly similar view. Returning to Dewey’s insights shared in the last chapter, we find Dewey underscoring the way that the ‘deep-seated individualism’ of American society has indelibly shaped Anglo-American institutions:

The early phase of the industrial revolution wrought a great transformation. It gave a secular and worldly turn to the career of the individual, and it liquified the static property concepts of feudalism by the shift from agriculture to manufacturing. Still, the idea persisted that the property and reward were intrinsically individual …. a fusion of individual capitalism, of natural rights, and of morals founded on strictly individual traits and values remained, under the influence of Protestantism, the dominant intellectual synthesis. (Dewey, 1930)

Here religious individualism gave rise to these secular institutions, but once in place these institutions come to reinforce an individualistic, independent view of self. In the earlier discussion of Anglophone social science, theories of liberal agency and autonomy are themselves part of the ‘cultural products’ that function to reinforce such mental models. That is, our academic theorizing itself is not distinct from this culture cycle, as Dewey well recognized.

It may be useful to illustrate further with a brief empirical example. In one study, Markus, Uchida and others (Markus et al., 2006) compared how Olympic athletes’ motivations and emotions are covered in the media coverage in Japan and the United States. In Study 1, they examined the word-for-word content of Japanese and U.S. newspaper, television, and magazine coverage (including athlete commentary, reporter analysis, and commentator analysis) of 77 Japanese and 265 American athletes at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Figure 5.2 shows the results of this analysis.

Fig. 5.2

Media coverage of Olympic athletes in Japan and the USA. (Adapted from Markus et al., 2006)

Here American news articles tended to mention personal characteristics such as ‘athletes’ abilities and personalities’ and ‘competitiveness and rivalry’ with greater frequency than the Japanese articles. In contrast, Japanese news articles tended to mention ‘others’ (family, coaches, friends) more often than American articles, and to focus on bringing joy to the people around them and their fans as a major motivator. In addition, news content that focused on the ‘athletes’ emotions’, such as their individual moods in competition situations, was also mentioned more often in the US. The study also looked at the amount of coverage of positive factors such as ‘talented’ and ‘former champion’ versus negative factors such as ‘weak-minded’ and ‘had a hard time’. In the United States, the media paid little attention to negative elements, whereas in Japan, the media covered the negative elements in roughly equal proportion to the positive elements.

Stepping back to view this conceptually, reporters writing these stories were influenced by culture, and those reading the stories had their cultural dispositions about what leads to ‘good’ performance further reinforced. We can imagine readers would go on to attribute their own success in more mundane tasks in similar ways—individual strength for Americans, an affordance by others among Japanese. That is, the cultural product of the Olympic news coverage produced and was a product of the larger dispositions in these two divergent cultural contexts. That is, mind and culture co-constitute.

(Mis) Measurement Revisited: Happiness Rankings as Cultural Product

Chapter 2 devoted considerable time to outlining the different means of measuring and ranking happiness emerging over the past decade, those following in the wake of a collective loss of faith in the GDP=Happiness equation of the twentieth century. We showed that on some rankings such as the SPI, Japan scored rather high. However, on other rankings such as the WHR, Japan and Korea scored poorly, at least in comparison with other high-income countries. These differences in ‘ranks’ largely come down to whether or not subjective well-being is included, and how much it is weighted in the total score: the more a given rank leans on subjective well-being, the lower Japan and East Asia tend to score. Indeed, on the Cantril Ladder (Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top…) the average score for Japan is consistently around 6.5. These results rarely fluctuate, no matter whether it is an international survey or large-scale domestic surveys. Figure 5.3 illustrates this, showing scores over three consecutive years (2009–2011), for a representative sample of 4000 Japanese citizens aged 15–80 on a ten-point Cantril-style life satisfaction scale (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, 2011). These years were a highly eventful time that included the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and Japan’s Triple Disaster of 2011. Yet we see strong continuity. Although data is not yet available, we would expect to see the same continuity across the COVID pandemic as well. Figure 5.4 gives further indication of the cultural nature of responses: there is virtually no difference between the average male and female responses for these survey years.

Fig. 5.3

Consistency of Life Satisfaction Scores in Japan over time (2009–2011)

Fig. 5.4

Consistency of Life Satisfaction Scores in Japan across sex/gender (2009–2011)

We certainly recognize that there is much room for improvement in Japanese society. These include trying to achieve better work-life balance, inadequate time for family relationships and child care, and perhaps ways to raise hope about the future prospects of the society amidst Japan’s prolonged recessionary economy. Recognizing differences should not become an excuse for non-improvement. However, as we have gestured to throughout, the models of happiness research proposed so far, and now institutionalized in global rankings, derive largely from the WEIRD North American context, and—taking one step further back—the European cultural, religious, and philosophical tradition from which it evolved. The questions included in these survey indicators/instruments already reflect the cultural values behind its creation and cannot be separated from them. Indicators, measurements, and rankings are all ‘cultural products’.

In an earlier era defined by national borders and surveys (e.g., census surveys), we might assume ‘fit’, at least to some extent, between measurement and culture. Yet, the rise of global rankings that seek to encompass all cultures, force us to pause and re-assess. Indeed, the very assumption that a single global indicator might deliver a comparable view of happiness worldwide reflects a universalist assumption about happiness itself. Rankings require a single measurement criterion, but this in turn rest on a methodological assumption that myriad human communities worldwide are the same. Similarly, the inability to recognize larger cultural variations in happiness and well-being reveals a culturally determined predisposition to focus only on purportedly a-cultural individuals. Hypothetically, we might decide to measure happiness around the world by focusing on how much excitement people feel every day, to produce an index for the question “How much do you feel happy every day?”. Yet, to do that would begin from the assumption that (1) excitement is an indicator of happiness, and (2) daily mood is a better indicator of happiness than a more long-term evaluation. Just to underscore this point, let us hypothesize an extreme example: What if Californians, where the average household has more than two cars and where public transportation is primitive, created an indicator that defined happiness as the number of cars a person owned, then measured it globally, and ranked countries accordingly. Would we accept this as a valid scale? The key point here is that cultural values and dispositions are inherent in all forms of measurement. By extension, these measurements function as culture products both reflecting the minds of those who make them, and influencing the minds of those who pay attention to them (policymakers, media, public, etc.).

What then are some of the assumptions inherent in existing indicators? One is, as touched on above, the notion of happiness as acquisition and attainment: ‘getting’ the life you want or a future ‘ideal’ in the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and Cantril Ladder, respectively. A second assumption is the individual, an inward-reference point: ‘I’ get what I want, ‘I’ feel satisfied. Here the quality of relationships or surrounding environment that affords happiness is rendered invisible. Instead, focus is placed on the autonomy (or agency), inwardness, and motivation of the individual respondent. A third assumption, more prevalent among those who try to create hierarchical rankings, is that the higher the score, the more ‘happy’ a given group of people are. The Cantril Ladder was proposed by Hadley Cantril, a Princeton University psychologist, and despite working with the middle-class American population in the mid-1960s, his work claimed universalism with his title The Pattern of Human Concerns (1965). The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) was developed in the early 1980s by Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, whose subjects were 176 American undergraduates. Although derived from the North American cultural context, these WEIRD cultural products have gone global, carried forth by both the universal assumptions of their originators and the global shift to happiness.

Yet, Japan, and arguably most of East Asia, does not share these first assumptions. Instead of an internal, inwardly focused reference point, happiness in Japan is externally, outwardly focused. In line with deeply held ideas that the inner is indivisible from the outer environment (recall Nishida), judgments of happiness are gauged in relation to significant others and surrounding context. Second, in place of attainment, we find attunement: happiness signifies a resonance with the surrounding world; the degree to which one finds oneself in tune with the contextual milieu. Third, in a Yin-Yang conceptualization of happiness, the ideal range of happiness is the ‘middle’: a moderate level, with an awareness that extreme levels of happiness cannot continue indefinitely, and are likely to lead to extreme levels of unhappiness. In this mode, happiness is not an unalloyed good but—like all things—carries negative potential, for example, inviting jealousy or having adverse social consequences. Better to abide in moderation, in tune with surrounding others. Better not to get too carried away in the positive elements, blinding one to a latent negativity that will eventually reveal itself. Here, beyond mere cultural response bias, we can envisage how deeper cultural reasons play a role in Japan’s ‘low’ marks on subjective well-being. Differences derive from deeper sources—such as self-construal and worldview—but are, when read through North American cultural products, understood as deficiencies.

In response to this situation, Uchida, alongside others in Japan, has developed an alternative measure: The Interdependent Happiness Scale (IHS). The IHS derives from assumptions closer to the relational, allo (other)-centric view of happiness dominant in Japan and much of East Asia. It measures individual perceptions of the interpersonally harmonized, quiescent, and ordinary nuances of the term. As shown in Fig. 5.5, sample items include ‘I believe that I and those around me are happy’, ‘I feel that I am being positively evaluated by others around me’, and ‘I can do what I want without causing problems for other people’.

Fig. 5.5

Interdependent Happiness Scale Items. (Adapted from Hitokoto & Uchida, 2015)

Compared with SWLS, these items gesture toward and capture a different worldview and notion of happiness. Hitokoto and Uchida (2015) began developing the scale with Japanese college students, but then validated it—both among students and adults—in various different cultural contexts worldwide, including the USA, Germany, Korea, Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines (Hitokoto, 2014; see also Datu et al., 2016). This is a key point: it underscores that happiness, even in other cultural contexts, can contain the meaning of ‘harmony with others’. In fact, as shown in Fig. 5.6, this scale tends to show less variation between diverse cultural groupings worldwide, as compared with those derived from life satisfaction.

Fig. 5.6

Results of Interdependent Happiness Scale-based survey for select countries. (Derived from Koyasu (2012))

That is, the gaps that emerge between Latin American countries, North America, and East Asia in the subjective surveys reviewed in Chap. 3 tend to be far less pronounced in this scale, strongly suggesting less cultural bias in the measurement instrument itself (recall the way the SPI, BLI, and WHR varied widely). We read this as evidence that an interdependent, attunement mode of happiness is more widely understood worldwide, as compared with an independent, attainment mode. Utilizing this alternative measure, we can confirm that happiness in Japan, Korea, and China is not in deficit compared with North America (USA, Canada) and Northern Europe (Switzerland). Different, not necessarily deficient.

Building on this work, Uchida has recently collaborated with leading researchers worldwide to produce the first Global Survey of Balance and Harmony (GSBH). The GSBH was incorporated into the 2022 World Happiness Report (WHR), demonstrating a successful case of the recognition of diverse modes of happiness. Introducing the GSBH, the authors of the WHR recognize a similar problématique to the one we have unfolded here:

Rather than only comparing cultures on concepts and metrics developed in Western contexts, there is increasing recognition of the importance of studying cultures through the prism of their own ideas and values, and of exploring cross-cultural differences in how people experience and interpret life. … Arguably the most widely-studied cross-cultural dynamic is one that is germane to this chapter, namely the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. (WHR, 2022, p. 132)

The GSBH items included in the survey are shown in Fig. 5.7. Most of the items largely mirror the forms of happiness we have outlined thus far. That said, in the current volume we have not heavily discussed the notion of high-arousal versus low-arousal (excitement vs. calm) due to space. This is an important difference first recognized by Stanford psychologist Jeannie Tsai. Yet these items follow the contours of the discussion thus far: excitement signifies standing out, whereas calm represents attuning and fitting in.

Fig. 5.7

GSBH survey items. (WHR, 2022)

The WHR 2022 chapter covering GSBH concludes by underscoring the universality of balance and harmony dimensions of happiness: “first, balance/harmony ‘matter’ to all people, including being experienced by, preferred by, and seemingly impactful for people, in a relatively universal way. Second, and relatedly, balance and feeling at peace with life could be considered central to well-being, on a par with other key variables linked to high life evaluations, such as income, absence of health problems, and having someone to count on in times of need” (p. 145).

To reiterate, instead of viewing happiness measurements and rankings as objective truth, it is better to see them as cultural products that can both distort and reveal, and inevitably play a role in reinforcing or transforming existing notions of happiness. These measurements can be distorting when the values underpinning the indicators are unrecognized, casting particular cultures (often those who created them) as leaders, and everyone else as deficient. Yet, the measurements, if done well, can also be revealing, bringing to light different dimensions of happiness and the human experience that are perhaps felt but not articulated in a given culture. We suggest that subjective well-being focused on independence and attainment tends, when exported globally, to distort happiness and constrain human experience, as it narrows the focus to ‘internal attributes’ alone. This sort of (mis) measure inevitably leads to further cultural products such as news stories, policies, and pedagogies that narrowly focus on individuals and subjective well-being, that is, news stories of Finland as happy followed by efforts to borrow their policies and pedagogies. Within the current context of the dominance of North American models, the diversification of models such as the GSBH serves to call attention to elements that are missing in the contemporary global discourse: balance, calmness, and allo-centric attention. In the same way, this recognition can lead, in turn, to alternative cultural products that place a greater emphasis on these elements. In terms of the earlier mutual constitution of cultures and selves conceptualization, these measures can help either reinforce or transform the selves that collectively constitute a society and culture. Transformation of the wider trend of global culture favoring WIERD approaches starts with a shift away from deficit to diversity.

(Mis) Measurement, Institutions, and Practices: The Case of Education

In our modern societies, schooling has become the primary social institution charged with transmitting culture. Its explicit mission is to socialize and enculturate the next generation into the worldview of the previous one. Even in liberal systems, such as the United States, that claim to be educating youth to challenge the existing status quo by exercising individual agency, cultural continuity prevails. Moreover, it is to the education system that the adult world turns when it seeks to alter the status quo; when it attempts to reorient society toward new trajectories. As such, a focus on formal education (schooling) brings unmatched clarity to the themes at the heart of this chapter. It also adds a sense of urgency to the discussion: how we conceptualize and pursue student happiness today will, in large part, produce the world we live in tomorrow and the dominant form of happiness and well-being in the twenty-first century.

Within the wider global shift to happiness we have outlined, around 2015 the OECD’s Education and Skills Directorate announced its departure from a narrow focus on academic skills toward happiness and well-being. Its overarching goal was announced as ‘Well-Being 2030’. This partial pivot away from a narrow band of academic subjects—math, science, and reading—that purportedly indexed levels of ‘human capital’ in a given economy (country) was highly significant. The OECD was tracking the larger discoursal shift away from GDP, and built on the momentum of OECD’s BLI launched several years earlier. Beginning in 2015, the PISA tests—the flagship OECD educational work, administered every three years across over 90 economies/countries worldwide—would add questions to its supplementary Student Questionnaire to gauge levels of student happiness. These results would be analyzed separately, and published under a stand-alone report entitled Students’ Well-Being (OECD, 2017). In the PISA 2018 test, the OECD added further questions to understand the frequency of particular emotions in the lives of students. These included how often they felt ‘happy’, ‘joyful’, ‘cheerful’, as well as ‘sad’, ‘miserable’, and ‘scared’. It also asked about students’ ‘meaning in life’ by asking questions such as: ‘My life has clear meaning and purpose’ (Rappleye et al., 2023).

Figure 5.8 shows the results of the 2015 Student Well-Being Report (OECD, 2017, p. 71). The major East Asian countries are ranked at the very bottom: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Macao, and Hong Kong, with China (four provinces) not far behind. At the top of the scale are countries of Latin America and the Caribbean: Dominican Republic, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Clustered around the OECD average are many countries in Western Europe: France, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, with the United States also located here. Above average, but still below the leading Latin American countries are the countries of Finland, Russia, Lithuania, Iceland, and the Netherlands. Given the OECD’s continued focus on student achievement, OECD analysts took the next step of correlating these well-being scores with student performance (i.e., PISA 2015 science scores), as shown in Fig. 5.9. Countries of northern Europe are in the ‘High Satisfaction, High Performance’ quadrant, and countries of East Asia in the ‘Low Satisfaction, High Performance’ domain. These results appear to confirm the WHR rankings. The results implicitly suggest that the education systems of Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have found a way to educate happy youth, whereas East Asian system were producing high-scoring, but unhappy students.

Fig. 5.8

OECD’s survey of student well-being, results. (Adapted from OECD, 2017)

Fig. 5.9

OECD well-being scores and academic performance. (Adapted from OECD, 2017)

However, in light of previous chapters, how does the OECD’s Education and Skills Directorate obtain its ‘well-being’ score in PISA 2015? The score comes entirely from student responses to the Cantril Ladder. In stark contrast to the OECD’s larger BLI initiative that, as we saw in Chap. 2, included an expansive list of 11 categories and refused to rank, the OECD’s Education analysts elected to equate student well-being entirely with subjective well-being (life satisfaction). This led, predictably, to the distortions we have pointed out earlier: East Asian countries score dismally. Perhaps the OECD education analysts were simply in search of a single, ‘easy to use’ measurement to compare countries globally, naively unaware of differences globally.

However, other evidence suggests that the OECD has been deeply and consistently committed to the independent mode of self. In launching the PISA initiative in the late 1990s, the OECD started formulating a set of Key Competencies, a normative framework to guide all future PISA studies and development of survey indicators. Here is a snapshot of those Competencies:

Acting autonomously is particularly important in the modern world where each person’s position is not as well-defined as was the case traditionally. Individuals need to create a personal identity in order to give their lives meaning….

In general, autonomy requires an orientation towards the future and an awareness of one’s environment, of social dynamics and of the roles one plays and wants to play. It assumes the possession of a sound self-concept and the ability to translate needs and wants into acts of will: decision, choice, and action. (Ibid.)

Beyond the valorization of ‘autonomy’ we see here, the same report then goes on to specifically admonish against an interdependent mode, as individuals ‘need to develop independently an identity and to make choices rather than just follow the crowd’ (OECD, 2005, p. 14). The report also explicitly mentions that individuals need to be ‘optimistic’ as they look to the future.

Despite the fact that Japan and Korea were full members of the OECD, no representatives from East Asia were invited to participate in the formulation of these Key Competencies or the 2015 PISA Well-Being Questionnaires. Instead, Western-trained cognitive psychologists—those working from a universalistic premise, and unaware of (or dismissive) of evidence developed by cultural psychologists—decided on the measures, that is, the exclusive use of the Cantril Ladder. This OECD’s cultural product was subsequently adopted by leading global organizations like UNICEF. In 2020, UNICEF’s Worlds of Influence: Understanding What Shapes Child Well-Being in Rich Countries report ranked Japan second to last in the category of ‘Mental Well-Being’, largely due to low subjective well-being.¹ These results led to a round of recrimination in Japanese media, and sparked debates within Japan’s Central Council of Education around how to improve student happiness and well-being. We will come back to discuss this later development further below.

The OECD’s assumption that schooling universally functions to create independent, autonomous, and acquisitive individuals is contradicted by decades of scholarship on East Asian education. Work on Japanese education alone is voluminous, and has consistently stressed the different aspects of the Japanese schooling system all converge on the notion of “close interpersonal relations, as the primary means for effective teaching and learning” (Shimahara & Sakai, 1995, p. 168). Captured in keywords such as kizuna (Shimahara & Sakai, 1995) and minna (Ueno et al., 2022) that are pervasive slogans across Japanese education, everything from official school goals and curricular guidelines to forms of pedagogy to micro-rituals in classrooms revolve around relations and attuning.

For example, goals for elementary school routinely involve statements such as ‘get along well with others and help each other’, while middle school textbooks utilize the metaphor of an orchestra to teach one’s role in society: each instrument produces its own sound, but each finds its meaning in the larger ensemble. Pedagogical practices include, at the elementary level, small groups (han) as the primary unit and, at the high school level, whole-class teaching. Central to this teaching is a “pedagogy of feeling” (Hayashi et al., 2009), where affect is socialized in more allo-centric directions. Shared communal activities such as school cleaning and shared meals reinforce the idea that such modes are not limited to academic subjects, but an all-encompassing mode of living. The daily rituals of Morning Meeting (asa no kai) and Closing Meeting (kaeri no kai) found in homerooms even down to the preschool level, and collective bowing at the start of each lesson become the daily rituals that reconfirm the larger themes of relations and attunement. So central are relations to Japanese education, in fact, that some researchers point out that kizuna is “not a means to an end” but the end itself (see Shimahara & Sakai, 1995).

Contrary to the OECD’s view, relations are not subsequently built between autonomous individuals, but are fundamentally constitutive of one’s ‘own’ identity. ‘Following the crowd’ would be a gross misreading of what is taking place in these Japanese classrooms: the enculturation into a world of relations and attunement; socialization into an interdependent mode of self. And we insist this is not just something found in Japan: in Korea too the themes of interdependence and “affective relationality” are central (see Hyang, 2021).

We may briefly contrast this with the self that is ‘schooled’ in North America. So pervasive is the idea of individualism in the United States that it influences virtually all aspects of education:

• individualized instruction is the ideal, leading to smaller class sizes and ability grouping, as well as project-based learning driven by students’ individual interests;

• a heavy emphasis on choice in classrooms and the wider curriculum (e.g., high school elective classes);

• a cadre of specialists to address the individual needs of students, including school counselors;

• Individual Education Plans (IEPs) for struggling students; Independent Study Contracts, often for talented students, “designed to respond to the pupil’s unique educational needs, interests, aptitudes, and abilities” (California Department of Education, 2022);

• individualized, per-head funding schemes; an emphasis on self-direction, thinking for oneself;

• a system of college entrance applications that require a ‘personal statement’ where students lay out their unique path and attributes that make them worthy of admission.

And how about the affect modes enculturated in such schools? Growing up in California in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rappleye attended elementary school at the zenith of the self-esteem movement. In 1986, a California Congressman, concerned with rising crime and school underachievement and building on educational scholarship valorizing the concept, launched the Task Force on Self-Esteem. The Task Force encouraged schools to provide opportunities for students to learn to evaluate themselves positively, focus more on accentuating the unique attributes of each individual student, and encouraging students to self-actualize. Indeed, the notion of self-esteem derives, in part, from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But the California Self-Esteem movement suggested that, in changing the way students think about their situation, higher stages could be reached sooner with positive effects on behavior and spillover effects for society. Optimism was key. Students were all taught to be positive and focus on our individual ‘potential’. The self-esteem movement led to a whole range of stand-alone programs that aimed to boost student self-esteem, self-expression, and self-worth, and led to a proliferation of other cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and, arguably, even social media paradigms such as California-based Facebook (Twenge & Campbell, 2009). Following movements like these, all across the United States, self-esteem is emphasized and this leads to children being taught from an early age to feel that they must have special, good, and unique traits (see Heine et al., 1999).

As discussed previously, North American research has identified the following as predictors of happiness: independence, control over one’s surroundings, life goals, personal growth, and self-acceptance (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). It is largely this view that the OECD Education Directorate has taken up in its conceptualization of happiness, with the ideal being the autonomous individual, forging his/her own identity and path forward, and looking optimistically to the future. Using the Cantril Ladder, an instrument which derives from the same American milieu, the PISA empirical results seem to confirm the underlying conceptualization. Yet, is it really that East Asian students are unhappy? Or is it the case, perhaps, that the underlying conceptualization, measurement, and ranking work together to obfuscate alternative modes of happiness?

Unfortunately, we cannot get at this question directly, as the Interdependent Happiness Scale has yet to be added to global surveys on students. Yet, one way to get at the question is to look back to earlier OECD tests (PISA 2012) which asked a more open-ended question about happiness to students, simply: “Are you happy at school?” This question shifts the focus away from the individual, and more toward the place; away from individual mental states, and more toward a relational understanding of where the school sits emotionally in relation to other institutions in a given society. Figure 5.10 shows the results, focusing on East Asian countries, in comparison with Northern European countries that topped the PISA 2015 Well-Being ranking, and the North American countries that have formed our comparative reference point through this volume.

Fig. 5.10

Happiness at school among select OECD countries (percentage of students who agree or strongly agree with the statement “I feel happy at school” in PISA 2012 (OECD, 2013, p. 32))

Here 85% of Japanese 15-year olds reported being happy at school. Other East Asian countries scored roughly the same, with the exception of Korea. Not only are these results above the overall OECD average, but these figures are roughly equal to the Northern European countries of Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium, with the exception of PISA-leaders Finland which scored below the OECD average. The United States scores below the OECD average, and well below the East Asian countries, including Japan and China. This calls into question the results of the individualized, self-esteem boosting approach found there. A range of recent research further corroborates that in Japanese schools, where relations and attunement are paramount, Japanese students, on the whole, feel less stress and pressure (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2018) and rates of bullying are lower, perhaps because relations are so heavily emphasized (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2020), as compared with American students. One study from 2017 that looked at student’s subjective feelings in greater detail found that East Asian high school students, on the whole, have far more positive feelings about school than their US counterparts, as shown in Fig. 5.11 (see Komatsu & Rappleye, 2020).

Fig. 5.11

Results of comparative survey of 10–12 graders for four countries. (NIYE, 2017)

Our point here is that these ‘alternative’ measurements and indicators provide much evidence to support an argument of a different form of happiness at work in East Asian schools. It is not, as the OECD’s rankings suggest, that East Asia is in deficit, but likely that its interdependent modes of happiness are not being captured within the dominant Western conceptualization and measures. East Asian students are being taught the interdependent mode daily, and they are learning their lessons well. Nonetheless, they are cast as deficient globally by leading organizations such as OECD and UNICEF.

It is worth noting that Japan’s Central Council for Education (JCCE), the highest policy advisory organ in the country, has recently focused heavily on student happiness and well-being. Yet, it is now well aware of the mismatch between the Western metrics and culturally dominant forms of happiness existing in Japan. Uchida was elected as a member of the Central Council in 2020 and was requested to help in the formulation of new, more appropriate indicators. Together, the authors—Uchida and Rappleye—have given numerous talks to the Council, and leading policymakers in the Ministry of Education as they seek to develop a culturally appropriate response to the wider global shift. Indeed, several of the ideas and examples found in the current volume were first shared in the wider policy discussions within Japan (see Uchida & Rappleye, 2022).

(Mis) Measurement, Institutions, and Policies: Regional Happiness, Organizational Culture, and Social Capital

Earlier we shared Dewey’s observation that the Protestant legacy led to ‘individual capitalism’, a position congruent with the sociological work of Max Weber. Today, most economists continue to promote these individualism-centered capitalist economic models, largely unaware of the underlying cultural assumptions. Take, for example, the idea of Human Capital, the theory that the knowledge and skills of individuals aggregate to drive organizational success and national economic competitiveness. Recently, the World Bank launched the Human Capital Project, formulating a Human Capital Index that seeks to calculate the potential economic productivity of individuals born in a given country over the span of their working life. The Bank subsequently called attention to a ‘Global Learning Crisis’, wherein education is portrayed as failing to generate the requisite human capital necessary for the benefit of a given society (World Bank, 2018). The assumption is, again, that individuals acquire knowledge and skills and, in the aggregate, these improve the lives of a given country. This basic framework is, in turn, resonant with a socio-political model that emphasizes individual rights, freedoms, and choices, and seeks to keep institutional constraints loose. This model gives rise to the free market, a socio-economic model in which each individual pursues his/her own interests, organizations compete for talent, and national competitiveness is paramount. All of this is pursued under the belief that the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. At one point in the 1980s, the belief in this model was so strong that the UK’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed there is “no such thing as society”, only individuals.

However, even a cursory review of the past few decades of free market globalization reveals the limits of such thinking. A company competing with rivals attempts to reduce the cost of its product, and thus makes the decision to shift manufacturing overseas where labor costs are cheaper. The result is that cities/communities rapidly lose employment when a factory moves. A network of secondary industry and services is lost alongside it. The working-age population leaves the local area to look for work and, as a result, the local area experiences a decline in income. This has been a common and devastating drama playing out across Japan, and increasingly across Korea and Taiwan. In low-income developing countries such as, say, Nepal and the Philippines, workers do not simply migrate to major cities, but instead leave their country altogether to work overseas in places like the Middle East. These workers send remittances back home, and these are recorded as economic gains for the country as a whole. Yet, the impact on local collectives—families, communities, and workplaces—is stark. Or take deregulation. A policy strategy promising greater efficiency in market allocation of human capital, deregulation has led to an increase in the use of temporary staff and short-term workers rather than regular employment. As a result, workers have less money in their wallets, and less rootedness and connection to a given organization and community.

American sociologist Robert Putnam (1995) famously put forth the notion of Social Capital, shifting the focus away from human capital. Defined as “the features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (p. 35), it called attention to the ways relations—coordination, trust, and cooperation—lead to benefits. For Putnam, the focus was on how the rapid decline in America’s social capital would endanger American democratic institutions. His work now appears prescient. But in the context of our volume we may extend this idea, by combining it with the interdependent mode we have been describing, in order to rethink what we should invest in now within the shift away from the twentieth-century GDP=Happiness equation.

For most economists, shifting to think about happiness and well-being, the nation or national society remains the focal point. Meanwhile, most psychologists tend to focus on the individual. Yet, when we examine our everyday lives we interact, identify, and feel allegiance to smaller units, such as family, school, workplace, community, or region. It is these meso-level units that we tend to feel and recognize the interdependent modes we have been describing here. If one feels happy skipping off to work one morning, but arrives to find oneself surrounded by unhappy co-workers, happiness and well-being are hard to maintain. In fact, organizations and companies in Japan have long been aware of this, and tend to engage in a large number of ‘collective activities’—practices that may seem odd or intrusive from a Western corporate perspective. In Japanese companies, people work together in units called ‘islands’ or ‘lines’. It is common to see office layouts where the desks face each other and the direct supervisor can look over their subordinates. They often wear similar uniforms. Events such as drinking parties, company trips, athletic meets, and morning meetings (sometimes involving shared cleaning and calisthenics), which were customary in virtually all Japanese companies in the past, are also collaborative. Although the ‘thickness’ of these intra-organizational relations vary according to type of industry, job level within the company, and even where the company is located (Tokyo tends to adopt more modern, Western work styles), it is widely recognized that building such ‘connections’ within an organization plays a role in reducing loneliness and improving employees’ sense of well-being. Sharing of organizational culture (i.e., explicit organizational philosophy) and collaboration between the company and the community are also thought to have a positive effect on the mental well-being of employees. Based on this, it is important that social scientists and psychologists alike begin to pay greater attention to the ‘middle’ (meso) level of organizational culture. That is, an interdependent mode of happiness necessarily focuses on collectives over individuals, putting the policy emphasis on investing in the social capital of the meso-units.

More concretely, in contemporary Japan, rural communities are acutely aware of and concerned about the problems generated by a rapidly declining population (aging, combined with outward migration of youth to cities in search of work). In many areas there is a sense of resignation, a feeling that nothing can be done. Although the older people wish to preserve the villages, their children have already left to the cities. In such cases, simply measuring levels of happiness is insufficient. Creating new measures, specific to these regional and local communities is important. Capturing the diversity of regional, community, and organizational units within measures becomes necessary. How do residents of a given location feel about immigration from other areas? What unique traditions or natural sights bring a sense of happiness to local residents? Such conversations at the meso-level are important for creating the conditions for interdependence to flourish. Based on these discussions, policies can be created that maintain connection and share values within those regions, communities, and organizations (such as strengthening and mobilization around key cultural festivals, in the case of Japan). Creating such policy discussions and guidelines helps engage people in re-evaluating the social, natural, and cultural environment in which they live and understanding how these link to collective happiness and well-being.

Given that the current volume is primarily focused on the global discussion and most readers will be less familiar with the specificities of localities in Japan, we have chosen to devote less space to the discussion of the meso- and local aspects. Yet, in other work, we have engaged in substantial research and developed models looking at this dimension (e.g., Uchida & Takemura, 2012). As shown in Fig. 5.12, we envisage the investment in meso- and regional social capital as catalytic for a virtuous cycle, leading to higher levels of interdependent happiness alongside the continuation of traditions and creative re-articulation of those interdependent ways of living. Amidst the push to think about happiness globally, it is important for countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, which have all experienced decades of emphasis on ‘individual capitalism’ and GDP=Happiness, to remember that interdependent happiness is fostered more within the intimate meso-spaces between nation and individual.

Fig. 5.12

Social capital and sustainability: an interdependent approach