What kind of person are you?

Are you independent--individual, unique, and in control of your world? Are you interdependent--relational, similar to others, and good at adjusting to situations?

Or are you both?

In Clash!, leading cultural psychologists Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner show us how our cultural backgrounds create and reflect these two basic ways of being a self, which then shape everything from how we run our governments to how we raise our children.

Markus and Conner also demonstrate how clashes between independence and interdependence fuel many of today's most pressing conflicts, including tensions between East and West, the Global North and Global South, men and women, blacks and whites, conservative and liberal, religious groups, rich and poor, and businesses, governments, and nonprofits.

Provocative and entertaining, Clash! offers solutions to many of the problems that plague our workplaces, schools, and relationships. For readers of The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, it doesn't just explain who we are, it also envisions who we could become.

Hazel Rose Markus

Hazel Rose Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Markus is the author of more than 150 publications on the role of self in regulating behavior and on the ways in which the self is shaped by the social world. She has developed the concepts of self-schemas and possible selves. This work shows how the self-system organizes perception, reasoning and memory and reveals the constructive role of the self throughout the life course. In experimental and survey studies, she has studied how the self and other psychological processes are grounded in cultural and social contexts. She received her B.A. from California State University at San Diego and her PhD. from the University of Michigan. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and in 2008 received the American Psychological Association's award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution. She has served as co-director and director of Stanford's Research Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). She is co-author of Culture and Emotion: Their Mutual Influence, Engaging Cultural Differences:The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies, Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference, and Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century.

Alana Conner

Alana Conner, PhD, is a cultural psychologist and science communicator who writes, speaks, and consults about enhancing the well-being of diverse populations around the world. An expert in social class differences in decision-making and health behavior change, she has published her research in the top journals of experimental psychology. She has also shared her findings through venues such as "The New York Times Magazine," "Edge.org," and the "Stanford Social Innovation Review," where she served as senior editor for five years.

Never confined to the classroom or the page, Dr. Conner has ten years experience designing interventions and communications for museums, broadcast media, and the Web. In positions ranging from Vice President of Content for The Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose, CA) to co-host of the podcast channel "Social Innovation Conversations," she has crafted stories, messages, and interactive experiences that change behaviors among culturally diverse audiences.

Dr. Conner earned her bachelor's cum laude and with distinction in psychology from Yale University, her doctorate in cultural psychology from Stanford University, and her postdoctoral certificate in psychology and medicine from the University of California, San Francisco medical center, where she received the Robert Harris Award for Outstanding Postdoctoral Research. Her research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Conner now lives and works in San Francisco.