Links between personal autonomy and responsibility in United States and Russian youth

Several institutions contributed to a paper in Journal of Research in Personality.

One of the co-authors is Martin Lynch (University of Rochester), a longtime collaborator of Kazan Federal University.

The publication team held three cross-cultural studies. They wanted to find out how autonomy and personal responsibility influence each other. Dr. Lynch explained, "We tested a hypothesis that psychological freedom, or autonomy, and personal responsibility complement each other, and found out that freedom causes responsibility, and not vice versa".

The first questionnaire covered 832 Russian and American students. They had to answer questions about a hypothetical situation where their professor gives them a task project. A number of students were told that they are free to choose their topic, and the others had to implement something that the professor had chosen for them. During the next stage, a part of students were given full responsibility for their results, and the other part was told that their results would have no influence whatsoever (no responsibility). The autonomy levels were measured with the Index of Autonomous Functioning.

As an outcome, two hypotheses were confirmed – "autonomy levels correlate positively with personal responsibility levels" and "contextual support for autonomy strengthens personal responsibility." The researchers also concluded that Russian youngsters came across as slightly less responsible because of the lower levels of autonomy in the Russian society.

In another research in 2017, 598 students were questioned. The responsibility hypothesis had a rather unexpected development. "The latest results showed that Russian people are inclined to accept more responsibility than Americans when they are sought out by friends or family but not by authorities or strangers," said Dr. Lynch.

Thus, the takeaway was that rising autonomy levels lead to more personal responsibility.

More information:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/ … 0092656616302045?via%3Dihub

Provided by Kazan Federal University