Psychology is an American product because it has a distinctive American style. The style derives from its implicit and underlying model of agency, a model that is built deeply and broadly into the foundation of psychological theorizing in all areas-social, personality, developmental, cognitive, neuroscience, evolutionary and clinical (Markus & Kitayama, 2004; Miller, 2004). This model holds that normatively good actions originate in the attributes of an autonomous self, and that the actions of this self should be experienced as disjoint, that is, as separate from the actions of others. This model of agency as disjoint is widely distributed and reflected in American economic, political and legal institutions, in the media, in religion and in language.

In other cultural contexts, there are other solutions to the problem of what impels individual action. For example, in a conjoint model of agency, others are formative of agency such that individual actions require the consideration and anticipation of the perspective of meaningful others. Studies comparing features of American and East Asian contexts, as well as studies comparing the responses of individuals engaging in these contexts, suggest that differences in models of agency can explain cultural variation in a wide variety of psychological experience including motivation, choice, cognitive dissonance and well being. Studies within American contexts, comparing middle class and working class contexts, suggest that the disjoint model is a good fit for middle class contexts, but not for working class contexts, where agency assumes other forms. Working class contexts do not easily afford the sense of having many choices and many opportunities for self and expression and control over environments. Together these studies suggest that how people experience agency can vary quite dramatically depending on the prevalent ideas, structures, and practices of their contexts, and that psychology's basic descriptive and normative model of agency is, in fact, a middle class American one.