Understanding Self-Promotive Interdependence: An Exploration in Sub-Saharan Africa
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Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is becoming increasingly significant in global cultural, political, and economic contexts. Despite its rich cultural diversity, we hypothesized that many SSA cultures are characterized by a unique combination of intense personal goal pursuit (self-promotion) and strong commitment to ingroup relationships (interdependence). This seemingly paradoxical combination can be reconciled if personal success contributes to collective prosperity. To test this hypothesis, we examined emotional expression patterns in four SSA countries and compared them with those in Latin America, East Asia, and the West. Our findings reveal that in SSA, success elicits not only feelings of pride—indicating the perceived attainment of self-promotion—but also feelings of connection, indicating social bonding. Notably, this pattern was observed regardless of whether the success belonged to the self or someone close, suggesting that success is perceived as group-serving and socially shared. In contrast, in all other cultural regions tested, personal success was primarily linked to pride, while a close other’s success was associated with feelings of connection. Failure experiences elicited complex patterns of emotional expression in SSA— including camaraderie, self-blame, and blaming others—patterns that were relatively unique to SSA. Altogether, our findings offer the first evidence of "self-promotive interdependence" as widely shared in SSA cultures, manifested in distinct patterns of emotional expression that reflect and reinforce the integration of personal identity within densely knit interdependent social relations. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the unique cultural dynamics in SSA.
