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Related Experiment Videos

Pancultural self-enhancement.

Constantine Sedikides1, Lowell Gaertner, Yoshiyasu Toguchi

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, England. cs2@soton.ac.uk

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|January 10, 2003
PubMed
Summary
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Self-enhancement, the desire for positive self-regard, is universal. People worldwide, regardless of culture, enhance themselves on personally important attributes, demonstrating a shared human motive.

Area of Science:

  • Psychology
  • Cross-cultural psychology
  • Social psychology

Background:

  • The universality of self-enhancement motive was challenged by culture movement.
  • Proposed that self-enhancement is prevalent in individualistic cultures but absent in collectivistic cultures.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether Westerners and Easterners use different tactics to achieve positive self-regard.
  • To test if self-enhancement is a universal human motive.

Main Methods:

  • Study 1: Participants from differing cultural backgrounds (United States vs. Japan).
  • Study 2: Participants with differing self-construals (independent vs. interdependent).
  • Assessed self-enhancement on individualistic and collectivistic attributes and attribute importance.

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Main Results:

  • Americans and independents self-enhanced on individualistic attributes.
  • Japanese and interdependents self-enhanced on collectivistic attributes.
  • Attribute importance mediated self-enhancement across cultures and self-construals.

Conclusions:

  • Self-enhancement is a universal human motive.
  • People self-enhance on personally important dimensions, irrespective of cultural background or self-construal.
  • Cultural differences lie in the tactics used to achieve self-enhancement, not in the motive itself.