Discussing Self-Esteem, Culture and Morality.

A New Way to Present my Podcast

Season one of the Podcast Without Borders: Stories by the Inescapably Foreign lasted from October 2022 to June 2023. My goal was to share people’s stories to see beyond the constructed boundaries of borders and expand cultural sensibilities.

I was also pissed off with bureaucrats. I hoped that by sharing people’s struggles, we could pressure government bodies to make their immigration systems less archaic, racist, and slug-like.

As much as I loved interviewing people from around the world, I no longer had the financial savings to continue the project and had to focus more on teaching hours. However, the Substack community gives me hope for season two.

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and the major listening platforms didn’t work for me. I wasn’t built for that world. I’m meant for a platform that gives people freedom.

Nishant Jain

inspired me with how he presented his podcast. As a storyteller, playing with form, presentation, and structure ignites creativity.

Some of you have time to listen to an entire episode, some want clips, some want to read, some want visuals, and some want a mixture of everything. You choose the experience.

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Discussing Self-Esteem, Culture and Morality with Dr. Steven Heine

If you read “The Textbook That Influenced Everything I Do” on

The Books That Made Us

, you know Steve’s work’s influence on me. Over half the essays and stories I write cite his textbook Cultural Psychology. And that’s precisely why I’m starting this multimedia approach with his episode.

Full Episode

Highlights

Nolan: Spain is a Western country, but the longer I live here and the more I get to know the culture and the more I apply what I know from cultural psychology, I realize how collectivistic it actually is. 

And I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but I remember in your book, you mentioned one of the reasons that societies might become more collectivistic or individualistic depends on whether they had rice or wheat. Because to cultivate rice, you need to work as a team. And with wheat, you can do it by yourself or with a small unit. And then I thought, here in Spain, this has something to do with paella rice [Laughs]. I dunno, though.

Steve: Yeah. There are many different parts of our environment that shape the cultural norms that emerge. And the one you just alluded to is a big one—The key crops that we grow. For much of history, most people were involved in food production. And yeah, wheat farming is something that is largely done by a single family. Whereas growing rice is quite different. This involves a lot of coordination with others and a hierarchical power where you look for governing authorities to decide what’s happening.

A lot of this research has been done within China. In the rice-growing regions, you see more evidence of this collectivistic way of thinking than in the wheat-growing regions.

Nolan: And bringing up the crops and the plow and everything, it even influences egalitarian views as well, right?

Steve: Yeah, so that’s some interesting research done by some economists, um, such as Nathan Nunn. What they were looking at was the idea of why countries differ in terms of their norms towards gender equality, and they're really quite vast differences. The key argument—and there’s a lot of data to back this up—is that farmers adopting the plow had big changes. People used to do agriculture largely with a stick, like a hoe. and you would sort of dig a hole and put seeds in there. Farming then was practiced by both men and women in the community.

Then the plow came along, and it was really good for agriculture cuz you could plant seeds far more effectively. But the problem with the plow is it’s kind of dangerous, so you don’t want little children around. And around the world, mothers do more childcare with infants.

Plus, it involves a lot of upper body strength. So you end up with farming becoming the man’s job. And all of a sudden, you have this big sort of sexual division of labour.

So, what you can see is that how long a region has been using the plow predicts how unequal the gender norms are today. And so, in places where the plow came later—in Scandinavia, the plow came much later—there's been less time for this gender division of labour to emerge.

For more, you can visit Harvard’s “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough.”

Nolan: If you travel the world, no one gives a shit about your self-esteem. It's such a North American idea. I’m being a bit hyperbolic.

Steve: I’ve done quite a bit of research, and self-esteem is really the first topic I looked at in my career. I got interested in this because right after I received my undergrad, I went to teach English for a couple of years in a tiny town in rural Japan called Obama, of all things.

I came fresh from university with my psychology degree, and I thought I understood how people work and what motivates them. And I tried to apply that to being a teacher. And so one of the things that I would do whenever I was teaching my Japanese students English was say, you know, good job.

I was co-teaching, and one teacher in particular was bothered by me doing this and would say, “Why did you tell that kid he was doing a good job? He did a bad job.”

This ultimately led to this self-esteem research program.

The research also aligns with what my guest, Ikue Ueno, experienced in Japan and Canada.

Ikue: When we're talking about children like “You’re wonderful.” And, you know, bravo for everything. It's a very different way of raising a child. I think in Asian culture it's like, you know, do you know the word kaizen?

Nolan: No.

Ikue: It’s a very commonly known word in a business society nowadays. It means improvement, basically. And I think business people use this particular Japanese word because it’s stoic, you know? Living in Japan, we're constantly pressured to be perfect and instead of just appreciating what we are good at, it's like, okay, we're good at this, but then let's look at this one thing that is not perfect. And yeah. And, you know, it doesn't make me feel good at all. But that's how I was raised. I never felt like I was enough.

For more, check out exploring mental health and other cultural differences part 1 and part 2.

Do your experiences align with the research? Let’s discuss this in the comments!

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I’d love to know what you thought. I enjoy playing with form and structure, so I’ll adjust as I learn from the Born Without Borders community.

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