Adapting to an individualistic social world means honing personal attributes that persist across diverse contexts and relationships. By contrast, prospering in a regulated relational world means navigating very different kinds of relationships that demand quite different approaches and behaviours. Psychological evidence from diverse societies, including populations in the United States, Australia, Mexico, Malaysia, Korea, and Japan, reveals these patterns. Compared to much of the world, WEIRD people report behaving in more consistent ways—in terms of traits like “honesty” or “coldness”—across different types of relationships, such as with younger peers, friends, parents, professors, and strangers. By contrast, Koreans and Japanese report consistency only within relational contexts —that is, in how they behave separately towards their mothers, friends, or professors across time. Across relational contexts, they vary widely and comfortably: one might be reserved and self-deprecating with professors while being joking and playful with friends. The result is that while Americans sometimes see behavioural flexibility as “two-faced” or “hypocritical,” many other populations see personal adjustments to differing relationships as reflecting wisdom, maturity, and social adaptness.

Henrich (2020), p. 32