Hazel June Linda Rose Markus (born 1949) is an American social psychologist and a pioneer in the field of cultural psychology.
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 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.
Recent books include Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction, and Clash!
[3] She received her bachelor's degree in psychology from San Diego State University, where she initially wanted to pursue a career in journalism.
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.
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.
The “individuals level” is the usual focus of psychologists and includes thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, feelings, emotions, biases, motives, goals, identities, and self-concepts.
The last and most abstract layer of the culture cycle is the “ideas level,” and it is made up of the pervasive, often invisible, historically derived and collectively held ideologies, beliefs, values, narratives and mindsets about what is good, right, moral, natural, powerful, real and necessary.
[12][13] Markus and Conner analyzed eight cultural divides that are consequential for people’s answers to the universal questions of identity and belonging (i.e., “who am i/are we?”).
With literary scholar Paula Moya, she examined what race and ethnicity are, how they work, and why achieving a just society requires taking account of them.