Personal Boundaries Among Russians and Americans: A Vygotskian Approach

This article examines Russians'and Americans'reasoning about the boundaries of responsibility within friendships. Matched Russian and American samples were asked to resolve dilemmas concerning personal responsibility between friends. It was found that the Rus sian subjects'resolutions of the dilemmas were, in general, charac terized by being less protective of the self than those of the American subjects. However, this was not the case in all situations, suggesting that the psychological differences between the two groups are best conceptualized in terms of the ways of speaking and thinking invoked in specific situations, rather than as traits or personality styles that are common to all members of a culture. A conceptuali zation of the relationship between individual psychological process es and cultural context, based on the work of Vygotsky (1981) and Wertsch (1991), is offered to explain the results.