CULTURE INFLUENCES PERSONAL GOALS, RESEARCHERS FIND

In one of the first cross-cultural investigations of personal goals, new comparisons by a University team of psychologists indicate that personal goals appear to match the emphasis of an individual's culture.

The psychologists, led by Andrew Elliot, associate professor of psychology at the University, sampled groups in Russia, South Korea, and the United States.

"Russians adopted almost twice as many 'avoidance goals' as people in the United States because their culture is directed at avoiding negative outcomes," Elliot says. "They don't want to cause disharmony in their group, they don't want to make waves; they want to fit in."

Elliot and coauthors Valarie Chirkov and Youngmee Kim at the University and Kennon Sheldon at the University of Missouri at Columbia studied the way people describe their goals and how they relate to physical and psychological well-being.

Their findings were reported in the November issue of Psychological Science.

As the researchers expected, people from Russia and South Korea focused their goals on avoiding certain situations. Surprisingly, though, these studies found that if goals match the culture-even if they are expressed in ways to avoid something-then a person's well-being may not be impacted negatively.

"The more avoidance goals people pursue, the worse their life satisfaction," says Elliot of earlier studies with U.S. citizens.
For those in a collectivist society, however, avoidance goals don't negatively impact well-being.

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