Hazel Rose Markus

Career and contributions

It is no small feat to be able to see human nature for what it is, to shake off the scales of one's own culture and existing scientific paradigms, and point the way for others, but this is an important part of Hazel's achievement. (John Bargh)

Markus became a faculty member in the psychology department and a research scientist at the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research and where together with Richard Nisbett she established the Culture and Cognition Program. With her husband, the late social psychologist Robert Zajonc, Markus moved to the Stanford department of psychology in 1994.

Markus' most significant contributions to social psychology are her conceptualizations of the self-schema, of possible selves, the theory of how cultures and selves shape each other, the distinction between the independent and interdependent selves, and the culture cycle.

Self schemas

Making sense of one’s own behavior in particular domains results in the formation of cognitive structures about the self, or self-schemas. These interpretive structures reflect one’s own observations as well as those offered by the social context, and lend coherence, meaning, and form to current and future experience. Self-schemas facilitate self-relevant judgments and decisions, contain easily retrievable behavioral evidence, provide a basis for the confident self-prediction of behavior in schema related domains and help people resist schema inconsistent information.

Possible selves

Possible selves represent individuals' ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming. They provide conceptual links among cognition, emotion, and motivation. They provide a context for understanding one's current self and are incentives and guides for future behavior.

Selves are culturally shaped shapers

Building on the work of earlier cultural psychologists Markus, together with social and cultural psychologist Shinobu Kitayama, has expanded the field of cultural psychology and examined how individuals’ many cultural contexts both shape and reflect individuals' emotions, cognitions, motivations, relationships, as well as their physical and mental health and their well-being.

Independent and interdependent selves

Markus and Kitayama distinguished between independent and interdependent selves, and among the different types of social contexts that give rise to these different ways of being a self or an agent. Selves in European American middle class contexts, for example, tend to emphasize independence and to view people as fundamentally separate individuals, unique, influencing others and their environments, free from constraints, and equal to others. Selves crafted in more interdependent national contexts such as Japan, by contrast, tend to view people as fundamentally relational, similar to others, adjusting to their situations, rooted in traditions and obligations, and ranked in hierarchies. People in all contexts become selves through their interactions with others and the social context. The difference rests with the nature of their relationships with others and their contexts.

With former students and colleagues, Markus validated the distinction between independent and interdependent ways of being with many laboratory studies comparing people in middle class European American contexts with those in East or South Asian contexts, showing, for example how cultural contexts influence choice, i.e., what is chosen, what choice means, the consequences of exercising choice or having choice denied, and how the opportunity for expression of preferences through choice is particularly characteristic of European American middle class contexts. Markus was among the first in social psychology to investigate social class as a significant cultural context and reveal how the ideas and practices of well-resourced middle or upper class contexts tend to foster independent selves, while ideas and practices common in less resourced, low income or working class contexts tend to foster interdependent selves. These studies also illuminate the powerful role of mainstream institutions in the U.S, such as universities, in fostering independent ways of being.

The culture cycle

Their research conceptualizes cultures as multilayered cycles of individuals, interactions, institutions, and ideas. Different blends of these culture cycles create different forms of agency. As described by Markus and Conner, the culture cycle is a model that represents culture as a system of four interacting layers. Culture includes the ideas, institutions, and interactions that guide individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and actions.

From the left side, the ideas, institutions, and interactions of an individual’s mix of cultures shapes the “I”, so that a person thinks, feels, and acts in ways that reflect and perpetuate these cultures. From the right side, I’s (i.e., individuals, selves, minds) create (i.e., reinforce, resist, change) cultures to which other people adapt.

The “individuals level” is the usual focus of psychologists and includes thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, feelings, emotions, biases, motives, goals, identities, and self-concepts. The “interactions level” is the part of the culture cycle in which most people live their lives. As people interact with other people and with human-made products (artifacts), their ways of life manifest in everyday situations that follow seldom-spoken norms about the right ways to behave at home, school, work, worship, and play. The next layer of culture is made up of the “institutions” level,” within which everyday interactions take place. Institutions spell out and formalize the roles for a society and include government, religious, legal, economic, education, and scientific institutions. The last and most abstract layer of the culture cycle is the “ideas level,” and it is made up of the pervasive, often invisible, historically derived and collectively held ideologies, beliefs, values, narratives and mindsets about what is good, right, moral, natural, powerful, real and necessary. These ideas inform institutions, interactions, and ultimately, the I’s. Culture cycles are embedded in ecological systems, and all of the systems—within the individual and without—are coevolving.

Markus and Conner analyzed eight cultural divides that are consequential for people’s answers to the universal questions of identity and belonging (i.e., “who am i/are we?”). These include: East versus West, Global North versus Global South, men versus women, rich versus poor, whites versus people of color, businesses versus governments and nonprofits, liberal religious groups versus conservative religious groups, and coasts versus heartlands. Using a blend of experiments, surveys, and analyses of cultural products, they show that one set of culture cycles (i.e., those of the West, the Global North, men, the rich or middle-class, whites, businesses, liberal religious groups, and the coasts) tend to promote independence, while the culture cycles of the less well-resourced and less powerful sides of these divides tend to promote interdependence. Any given person’s social orientation toward independence or interdependence will depend on that person’s mix of these culture cycles and on which ones are salient at a given time or situation. Given the hegemony of independence in American ideas and institutions, along with the historical dominance of color, culture and gender blindness, the more interdependent tendencies that arise from intersections of national culture with social class, race and ethnicity, and gender may go unrecognized and can be misunderstood and stigmatized.

Race and diversity

Markus has also explored concepts of race, ethnicity, diversity, colorblindness and multiculturalism. With literary scholar Paula Moya, she examined what race and ethnicity are, how they work, and why achieving a just society requires taking account of them. In their book, Doing Race, they emphasize that race is not something that people or groups have, or are, but rather a set of actions that people do. Specifically, race is a dynamic system of historically-derived and institutionalized ideas and practices. She has studied both the pride and prejudice consequences of racial identities, mixed racial identities, and the role of narratives and practices of colorblindness and multiculturalism.

At Stanford SPARQ, Markus and co-director Jennifer Eberhardt work with research scientists to design and implement programs and interventions that address police-community trust, trust and community building in universities, mobility from poverty, reducing bias in financial services, and strategies for cultural change.