The Culture of Authenticity: An Empirical Study of University Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds

This paper is an empirical study of the influence of individuals’ cultural background on their different experiences of authenticity. Due to a lack of consensus in the definition of the concept, sociologists have only recently started to study authenticity in an empirical way. This paper tries to contribute to this new field for sociology. It consists of a quantitative analysis of open-ended responses to Ralph Turner’s True-Self Method with 138 students from La Trobe University in 2013. It constitutes a partial replication of, and a complement to, another research study conducted by Turner at La Trobe forty years ago, in 1973. Today, La Trobe’s student body is more culturally diverse than it was at the time Turner did his study. Around 25% are overseas-born students, most of them coming from Eastern societies backgrounds. This is an opportunity to capture experiences of authenticity of individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and compare them. Building on the works of Ralph Turner and Ronald Inglehart on self-conception and values respectively, this paper establishes two cultural hypotheses that reflect the Eastern/Western societies divide in relation to experiences of authenticity. Turner found no relationship between respondents’ cultural background and their experiences of authenticity. However, considering the more culturally diverse conditions of contemporary societies, cultural hypotheses seem to be worth exploring.