“Within-Culture and Between-Culture Variation: Individual Differences and the Cultural Logics of Honor, Face, and Dignity Cultures”, 2011 (; similar):
The CuPS (Culture × Person × Situation) approach attempts to jointly consider culture and individual differences, without treating either as noise and without reducing one to the other. Culture is important because it helps define psychological situations and create meaningful clusters of behavior according to particular logics. Individual differences are important because individuals vary in the extent to which they endorse or reject a culture’s ideals. Further, because different cultures are organized by different logics, individual differences mean something different in each. Central to these studies are concepts of honor-related violence and individual worth as being inalienable versus socially conferred. We illustrate our argument with 2 experiments involving participants from honor, face, and dignity cultures. The studies showed that the same “type” of person who was most helpful, honest, and likely to behave with integrity in one culture was the “type” of person least likely to do so in another culture. We discuss how CuPS can provide a rudimentary but integrated approach to understanding both within-culture and between-culture variation.
[Keywords: culture, individual differences, within-culture variation, between-culture variation, honor, face, dignity]
…Face is defined essentially by what other people see. Thus, face is like honor in that the sentiments of other people are extremely important. Like honor, face also can involve a claim to virtue or top prestige. However, the settings—and consequently, the role expectations—are quite different for cultures of honor and cultures of face. Whereas honor is contested in a competitive environment of rough equals, face exists in settled hierarchies that are essentially cooperative.
1976 (pg883; see also 2001) defined face as “the respectability and/or deference which a person can claim… by virtue of [his or her] relative position” in a hierarchy and the proper fulfillment of his or her role. Thus, everyone in the hierarchy can have some face, though some may have more than others due to their position. Implicitly, people have face—unless they lose it. A person can “gain” face, and one person can “give face” to another, but the major focus is primarily on not losing face (Hamamura, Meijer, Heine, Kamaya, & Hori, 2009). This is reflected in the expression “saving face”, a saying that came into English from British expatriates living in China (“Face”, 2003).
Because face exists within a stable hierarchy, it is not competitive or zero sum. In an honor culture, one person may take another’s honor and appropriate it as his or her own; however, one cannot increase one’s face by taking another’s. In a face culture, people are obliged to work together to preserve each other’s face, and because it is bad form to cause another to lose face, formalities are carefully observed, and direct conflicts are avoided ( et al 2004; et al 2006; et al 2001; Sanchez-2004). If one person openly aggrieves another, it disrupts the harmony and order of the system. And unlike in honor cultures, it is not incumbent on the victim to directly redress the grievance himself or herself. Direct retaliation by the victim is unnecessary because the group or a superior is able to punish the offender; in fact, direct retaliation would be undesirable because it would further upset the harmony of the system.
The 3 H’s of a face culture are thus hierarchy, humility, and harmony (see discussion in Y.-H. 2010; Y.-H. Kim, Cohen, & Au, 2010). People are supposed to show appropriate deference to hierarchy. They are supposed to display humility and not overreach on status claims (lest they learn a painful and humiliating lesson about how much status others are willing to accord them). And they are to pursue, or at least not disturb, the harmony of the system.