The dominant values in filipino society on individual autonomy and self-determination:

Many Western psychological perspectives have posited the achievement of autonomy as an important developmental milestone (e.g., Erikson, 1968, Piaget, 1932). Autonomy is typically seen as presupposing a sense of agency (Bandura, 1989), and to include the capacity to make decisions and to exercise control over important areas of one's life (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Autonomy is generally believed to be related to the development of a sense of self and as assisting in the construction of a personal identity (Moshman, 2005, Nucci, 2001). The notion of personal autonomy also has implications for social organization, including relations among individuals in society, especially those between subordinates and authorities within social systems. For example, a sphere of autonomous decision-making, over which individuals may act according to their own discretion, is proposed to be at the core of moral conceptions of individual rights defining areas of personal freedom, over which authorities or other social agents may not legitimately interfere (Gewirth, 1978, Nucci, 2001).

This conception of autonomy, however, is not without controversy. Some have associated personal autonomy and individual rights with a Western cultural orientation that is not believed to apply or to be strongly held within non-Western societies. For example, some popular theoretical perspectives, generally grouped within the rubric of cultural psychology (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993), have contrasted Western and non-Western cultures along the dimension of individualism and collectivism, and have argued that varying conceptions of self and morality are held within individualistic and collectivistic societies (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987; Triandis, 1989). In individualistic societies, such as the United States, Canada, and those of Western Europe, it is argued that the self is construed as independent or separate from the social order, leading to a morality emphasizing individual rights, personal agency and choice, and equality. In contrast, it is argued that in collectivistic societies, such as those in Asia, South America, and Africa, a sociocentric or interdependent self emerges, defined in terms of the unique social roles that individuals occupy in the family or society, often by birth. The view of the self held in collectivistic cultures leads to a morality of duty, in which conformity to existing social role obligations, upholding hierarchy, and maintaining social harmony is stressed (Shweder et al., 1987). These cultural orientations are believed to be transmitted to individuals by authorities or other “local guardians of the moral order” (Shweder et al., 1987, p. 73), or are otherwise communicated through participation in cooperative social practices (e.g., Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, & Maynard, 2003).

In contrast, it will be argued here that autonomy entails universal psychological needs pertaining to agency and identity formation, expressed in different ways over different developmental periods (Ryan and Deci, 2001; Nucci, 2001). As children develop skills and abilities related to psychological needs for self-expression and competence, they will claim areas of autonomy related to the exercise of these abilities, in accordance with the possibilities afforded by different cultural environments. These conceptions of personal autonomy form the basis of universal claims to rights and freedoms found across cultural contexts. Although some aspects of the content of what is considered to fall within the exercise of personal autonomy and individual freedom vary across cultures and environments, limits on societal control may be identified, in the form of individuals’ opposing claims for personal jurisdiction and in the limits defining healthy psychological functioning. Concepts of personal freedom and associated rights are often constructed in the context of conflict, in which children's attempts to claim personal freedom are met with opposition by parents or other authorities. Evidence will be reviewed indicating that the developmental pathway toward autonomy shows many similarities across diverse cultures that are only beginning to be recognized and systematically explored.

Universal psychological needs for autonomy and their possible precursors in infancy

Recent research and theorizing in social and personality theory has devoted great attention to identifying different types of psychological needs and their relation to personal well-being across cultures (Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005). One such perspective, termed “self-determination theory”, proposes that autonomy is one of three fundamental, universal psychological needs (the others being relatedness and competence) whose expression is associated with psychological health and

Conceptions of personal autonomy in childhood and adolescence

The findings of the research with infants suggest that autonomy, in the form of agency, is first expressed in sensorimotor actions, and may include, at times, delimited areas of conflict and resistance, in which the exercise of emerging skills comes up against adult attempts at regulation and control. These behavioral expressions of agency or autonomy occur even before infants are generally recognized as having a representational capacity, and thus precede the construction of explicit

Rights and freedoms across cultures

The research on the personal domain reveals that the establishment of some form of personal decision-making discretion and privacy appear to be universal developmental tasks in diverse cultures. This research has been conducted in the context of social domain theory (Smetana et al., 2005, Turiel, 1998), where the major concern has been to determine whether and when children distinguish personal issues from other social domains, such as morality and social convention. The social domain approach

Conclusions

Some have argued that the development of autonomy takes radically different forms in different cultures, in accordance with variations in conceptions of self and morality. For example, building on propositions from cultural psychology (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993), Greenfield et al. (2003) have claimed that the emphasis on personal choice and individual rights in individualistic cultures leads to a developmental pathway favoring the goal of individuation or separation,

Acknowledgement

Preparation of this paper was supported by a grant to the author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#410050353).

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