Cultural Nuances of Agency-Wellbeing Relationship: Testing the Person-Culture Match and Cultural Heterogeneity Hypotheses

The well-being benefits of a sense of agency—beliefs about one’s control in shaping life outcomes—are well documented. Previous studies have relied on national-level value orientations or cultural orientations measured by country-level aggregates to understand the cultural contexts that may shape a person’s subjective well-being. Yet, we know little about whether the fit of the person to cultural context (person-culture match) and cultural heterogeneity of sense of agency shape the relationship between individual sense of agency and subjective well-being. Analyzing the World Values Survey Wave 7 data from 50 countries, using multilevel modeling (N = 73,120), we found that individuals benefited from living in countries with higher levels of agency at the aggregate level, independent of their person-culture match. We also found that individuals with a greater sense of agency living in more homogeneously agentic cultures reported higher levels of life satisfaction than those in more heterogeneously agentic cultures. Findings suggest the importance of cultural heterogeneity, rather than a pure person-culture match, in understanding the relationship between agency and well-being.