Hazel Rose Markus

Recent books include Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction, and Clash!: How to Thrive in a Multicultural World.

Markus was born Hazel June Linda Rose in London, England.

Her family later moved to Southern California.

She received her bachelor's degree in psychology from San Diego State University, where she initially wanted to pursue a career in journalism.

Following a demonstration in a Psychology 101 class on the formidable power of expectations to shape what you see and hear, she changed her major to psychology, holding onto her fascination with the role of the media and other aspects of culture in shaping the self.

She earned her doctorate in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

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.

Hazel June Linda Rose Markus (born 1949) is an American social psychologist and a pioneer in the field of cultural psychology.

She is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

She is also a founder and faculty director of Stanford SPARQ, a "do tank" that partners with industry leaders to tackle disparities and inspire culture change using insights from behavioral science.

She is a founder and former director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE).

Her research focuses on how culture shapes mind and behavior.

She examines how many forms of culture (e.g., region of origin, ethnicity, race, social class, gender and occupation) influence the self, and in turn, how we think, feel, and act.

Markus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

A former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, she is a recipient of the Donald T. Campbell Award, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Distinguished Scientist Award, and the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.

Markus is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.