Collectivism meets self-optimization: Thai cultural values and the paradox of self-development

Abstract

The global self-development industry rests on a culturally particular model of the person. Its characteristic prescriptions (set your own goals, put yourself first, promote your strengths, defend your boundaries) presuppose an independent self for whom other people are context rather than constituent. Thailand, on the available survey evidence, organises selfhood around interdependence. Scholarship has established that these models differ across societies and that autonomy in Self-Determination Theory is distinct from independence, but not what follows for the practice of self-development in an interdependent society. This article argues that the friction Thai audiences report with imported self-help is not a translation failure but a mismatch between two models of the person, resolvable by refounding self-development on relational autonomy, understood as self-endorsed action inside constitutive relationships, together with a non-maximising conception of enough drawn from the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy. It contributes a specification of four sites at which self-optimisation and Thai relational norms conflict; an account of relational autonomy that engages the problem of adaptive preference and unequal power; and a five-commitment model of self-development for interdependent settings, offered as a testable framework. Its extension beyond Thailand is advanced as a hypothesis, not a demonstrated result.