Hazel Markus

THE AMERICAN SELFWAY
Or How We Become Separate, Unique Individuals

By Kathleen O’Toole

earing a milk mustache, Dennis Rodman gazes out from a screen into an audience of educated middle-class women. "Here is Dennis Rodman advertising milk," Hazel Markus, the narrator of the slide show says. "In case you didn't know it, Dennis Rodman is not the boy next door. He's different, he's special."

Markus, the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, replaces the image of basketball's bad boy for one of an anonymous but distinctively appointed young woman. In a magazine ad for clothing, the bold type overlaying the picture orders viewers to "chart your own course." Next, Markus displays an ad that asserts "The Internet isn't for everybody." "But you are not everybody," Markus exclaims.

By the time the professor gets to an ad showing a four-wheel-drive vehicle careening around a curve, the audience needs no help interpreting. When they see the words "Ditch the Joneses" on the vehicle image, they break out in a roar. The message is clear, Markus says: To be a good, moral and healthy person in the U.S. today, you've got to "ditch the Joneses."

The lecture is on "our culture, our selves" by the social scientist who is most responsible for creating the field of cultural psychology. Markus, who came to Stanford in 1994 from the University of Michigan, is among the most cited psychologists in the world for her ideas and the clever experiments she has devised to test them.

"For many years, psychologists thought anthropologists studied culture and they, the psychologists, studied the mind," psychologist Laura Carstensen told the audience in introducing Markus. "Then Markus came along and

Hazel Markus (Plain text)

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