Beyond Niceness: Rethinking People-Pleasing Within a Cultural Context

Abstract

The present paper understands people-pleasing as a relational pattern of chronic self-adjustment in which individuals prioritize relational harmony over personal needs, essentially within their close relationships. While frequently observed in women’s relational experiences, there remains no comprehensive account integrating its dispositional, developmental, socio- cultural aspects within specific cultural systems and the domain of close relationships. This conceptual paper addresses that gap by proposing an integrative, descriptive model of people-pleasing, outlining its manifestations within close relationships (familial, romantic and friendships) of young Indian women in early adulthood. Drawing on theories and ideas from the literature on personality, feminist psychology’s relational identity theory, developmental psychology, cultural psychology, theories of hermeneutic labour, self-silencing and psychological well-being; this paper argues that people-pleasing in the young adult population can be best understood as a culturally scaffolded identity strategy, one that is learned through primary gender socialization, endorsed through cultural-moral frameworks, embedded at the level of identity through specific personality mechanisms and sustained in close relationships through ongoing relational labour, This paper is positioned as a precursor to a forthcoming study that employs Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore the lived experiences of ten young Indian women, understanding and negotiating this behaviour in their everyday lives. Implications emphasize intersectional and culture-specific primary research, need for clinical interventions such as boundary-work, and gender-norm awareness.