LAUSR

Self-help books, TED talks, and inspirational memes all claim that finding, following, and fueling one’s passion is critical to success. People should feel passionate about what they do, whom they love, and how they live (1). Consistent with these claims, Li et al. (2) show, in nationally representative samples of 1.2+ million high school students across 59 different cultures, themore “passion” one has for reading, math, and science, the higher one’s achievement scores. However, passion—defined as feelings of enjoyment, interest, and self-efficacy—mattered more in individualistic than in collectivistic cultures. Specifically, one unit of passion translated into an average of 22.67 points on standardized achievement tests in individualistic societies like the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, versus an average of only 12.69 points in countries like Columbia, Thailand, and China. If passion is so critical to success, why does it matter more in some cultures than others? And, if passion doesn’t matter as much in more collectivistic cultures, what does? Based on decades of research, the authors (2) suggest that the answer may lie in the different models of self that individualistic vs. collectivistic cultures foster (3, 4). In individualistic cultures, people are encouraged to bemore “independent,” or to see themselves as separate from others, whereas, in collectivistic cultures, people are encouraged to bemore “interdependent,” or to see themselves as connected to others. These models are reflected in and reinforced by products, practices, and institutions that are widely distributed in these cultures (3, 4). Consequently, people in individualistic cultures have more “independent” goals, which include expressing their preferences and molding their surroundings to those preferences. In contrast, people in collectivistic societies have more “interdependent” goals, which include attending and adjusting to their surroundings (5). But what do these goals have to do with passion? Achieving these goals requires varying levels of arousal and action. Our research finds that, because achieving independence requires increased arousal and action, cultures that foster these goals value higharousal positive states like passion, excitement, and enthusiasm. In contrast, because achieving interdependence requires decreased arousal and action, cultures that foster these goals value low-arousal positive states like calm, peacefulness, and balance (6). As a result, although people can experience similar feelings around the world, people value and ideally want to feel different feelings, depending on whether their cultures promote independence or interdependence. For instance, in the United States and Canada, people value excitement, enthusiasm, and other high-arousal positive states more, while people in different parts of East Asia (e.g., Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan) value calm, peacefulness, and other low-arousal positive states more (7–9, but also see 10). These affective ideals are pervasive throughout these cultures, popping up everywhere from children’s storybooks, to magazine ads, to politicians’ press photos, to other forms of popular media (8, 11, 12). These ideals matter because people use them to judge their own feelings (13), and, perhaps even more importantly, to judge the feelings of others. For instance, because European Americans value excitement more thanHong KongChinese, they rate “excited” faces (with broad toothy smiles) as much friendlier and warmer than “calm” faces (with closed smiles), compared to Hong Kong Chinese (14). And, because European Americans perceive excited (vs. calm) faces as friendlier and warmer, they share more money with excited vs. calm partners in economic games (e.g., the Dictator Game), compared to East Asians (15). In other words, as shown in Fig. 1, when people see faces that match their ideal affect, they judge themmore positively, and, because of these positive judgments, they share more resources with them. Experiencing and expressing cultural ideals can have life-altering consequences in the real world. When deciding whom to lend to on a web-basedmicrolending platform (Kiva.com), people from countries with an excitement ideal loaned more to borrowers who had “excited” smiles in their profile photos and less to borrowers