Dressler William W, Balieiro Mauro C, Dos Santos José Ernesto
Department of Anthropology, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35401, USA.
Department of Psychology, Paulista University, Ribeirão Preto 05347-020, SP, Brazil.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2024 Aug 30;14(9):762. doi: 10.3390/bs14090762.
The relationship between culture, as a set of norms that structure human social practice, and agency, as the human capacity to act, has been debated for decades. Achieving clarity in how these constructs intersect has been hampered by difficulty in measuring either one, and theory has not suggested how a model linking culture and agency might be specified. We present a model in which culture is measured as cultural consonance, or the degree to which individuals actually incorporate prototypes for behavior encoded in cultural models into their own behavior. This measurement is then integrated with a measure of individuals' sense of personal agency. In a previous study in urban Brazil, we found that personal agency was associated with higher cultural consonance, which in turn was associated with lower psychological distress; however, those data were from a cross-sectional survey, thus limiting the causal inference. Here we present the results of a follow-up study in which a subset of respondents was re-interviewed on average four years later. These data are consistent with a model in which cultural consonance is the proximate causal influence on psychological distress, while personal agency is a distal or exogenous influence. The implications of these results for the relative roles of culture and agency as influences on subjective well-being are discussed.
文化作为构建人类社会实践的一套规范，与能动性作为人类行动的能力之间的关系，已经争论了几十年。由于难以对其中任何一个进行衡量，要弄清楚这些概念是如何交叉的一直受到阻碍，而且理论也没有提出如何构建一个将文化与能动性联系起来的模型。我们提出了一个模型，其中文化被衡量为文化一致性，即个体将文化模型中编码的行为原型实际纳入自身行为的程度。然后，这种衡量与个体的个人能动性感测度相结合。在之前对巴西城市的一项研究中，我们发现个人能动性与更高的文化一致性相关，而文化一致性又与更低的心理困扰相关；然而，这些数据来自横断面调查，因此限制了因果推断。在此，我们呈现一项后续研究的结果，在该研究中，一部分受访者平均在四年后接受了再次访谈。这些数据与一个模型相符，在该模型中，文化一致性是对心理困扰的直接因果影响，而个人能动性是一种间接或外部的影响。我们讨论了这些结果对于文化和能动性作为影响主观幸福感的相对作用的意义。
