Kitayama, Culture and Communication Processes

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
//-->Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-RegardJournal of Experimental Social Psychology (in press)July, 2002Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-Regard:Evaluating Self and Friend in Two CulturesShinobu Kitayama and Yukiko UchidaKyoto University4686 wordsThis research was supported by Ministry of Education grants (B-20252398 and C-10180001).Yukiko Uchida was supported by a Japanese Society for Promotion of Sciences graduatefellowship. We thank members of the Kyoto University cultural psychology lab, who commentedon an earlier draft of the paper. Address correspondence to either Shinobu Kitayama or YukikoUchida, who are both at Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku,Kyoto 606-8501 Japan. Electric mail may be sent tokitayama@hi.h.kyoto-u.ac.jporuchida@hi.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp.1Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-RegardAbstractPast research indicates that people in some Asian cultures (e.g., Japan) often explicitly evaluatethemselves negatively while implicitly maintaining positive self-evaluations. Two studiesprovided evidence for the hypothesis that this pattern of explicit and implicit self-evaluations isquite common even outside of Asia, as long as the evaluations are assessed in the context of close,interdependent social relations. Thus, Study 1 applied a modified version of Implicit AssociationTest to both Japanese and Americans, and showed that the above pattern occurs in both cultures ifthe self is evaluated vis-à-vis one’s actual friend. Further, Study 2 indicated that when placed in acontext that has neither actual nor presumed emotional interdependence, both Japanese andAmericans manifest positive self-evaluations at both explicit and implicit levels. Implications forcultural crafting of the self are discussed. (133 words)2Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-RegardExplicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-Regard:Evaluating Self and Friend in Two CulturesSince William James (1890), self-esteem has been defined as a relatively unifiedpsychological structure. Its central component is a set of positive evaluations of the self(Rosenberg, 1965). This view of self-esteem has proved extremely useful in guiding an evergrowing body of research on the issue (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001, for a review). In the recent years,however, researchers have begun to suggest that this traditional notion of self-esteem may besomewhat simplistic. Most importantly, Greenwald, Banaji, and their colleagues have argued thatevaluations one explicitly makes of the self are often separate from evaluations that areassociated with the self implicitly (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). In the current work, we testthe hypothesis that these two evaluations show a paradoxical discordance when assessed in acontext of tightly knit, interdependent social relations.Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-RegardTo measure self-evaluations at an implicit level, Greenwald and colleagues have devisedImplicit Association Test (or IAT; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Greenwald, McGhee, &Schwartz, 1998). IAT involves two separate judgments. In one judgment, participants are to makea self-other categorization of each of various personal attributes (e.g., name, job, phonenumber, ..etc.) that are either associated with or not associated with the self. In another judgment,participants are to make an evaluative categorization of each of either positive or negativeevaluative words. After practicing each of the two judgments, the personal attributes and theevaluative words are mixed and presented in a random order. The participants are asked toperform either the self vs. not-self categorization when a personal attribute is presented or the3Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-Regardevaluative categorization when an evaluative word is presented. In one condition, the sameresponse key is assigned to both the “self” (or “not-self”) response in the self vs. not-selfcategorization and the “good” (or “bad”) response in the evaluative categorization judgment. Inanother condition, the combination of the responses in the two judgments is reversed. It has beenfound that the time required to make these judgments is considerably shorter when “self”responses are paired with “good” responses than vice versa. This demonstrates positiveevaluations implicitly associated with the self.The main impetus for the current research stems from the fact that implicit and explicitself-evaluations often disagree with each other. In the contemporary literature, such adisagreement has been discussed in terms of correlations between the two types ofself-evaluations across participants. Although these correlations tend to be positive especiallywhen relatively automatic components of evaluations are assessed (Koole, Dijksterhuis, vanKnippenberg, 2001), they are usually very weak (Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000;Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). Thus, the two self-evaluations often fail to converge acrossindividuals. The focus of the current work was different. We examine an analogous, yet logicallyindependent, disagreement that is found in terms of overall levels of the two types ofself-evaluations.Specifically, in some Asian cultures, self-criticism is quite pervasive at an explicit level.For example, it is well established that European-Americans make self-serving attributions ofsuccess and failure (Miller & Ross, 1975). But in some Asian cultures such as Japan and Korea,self-critical attributions are more common (Kitayama, Takagi, & Matsumoto, 1995). Similarself-critical effects have been repeatedly found in self-relevant judgments in East Asia (e.g.,Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997). Importantly, these effects happen even4Explicit Self-Criticism and Implicit Self-Regardwhen responses are either held entirely anonymous or measured unobtrusively and, thus, there isno obvious concern for public self-presentations (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999).In sharp contrast, at an implicit level, Asians do appear to hold positive evaluations ofthemselves. For example, Kitayama and Karasawa (1997) showed that Japanese evaluatealphabetical letters that are included in their own names more favorably than other letters in thealphabet. This effect suggests positive evaluations that are implicitly associated with the self(Nuttin, 1985). A similar effect has also been shown in the United States (Johnson, 1986) andThailand (Hoorens, Nuttin, Herman, & Pavakanun, 1990). Evidence along the same line has beenreported with an IAT for both Americans (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000) and Japanese(Yamaguchi & Murakami, 2000). Further, the same point has been made with a semantic primingmethod (Hetts, Sakuma, and Pelham, 1999). Taken together, this literature has begun to suggestthat the combination of explicit self-criticism and implicit self-regard is highly pervasive in someAsian cultures such as Japan. In contrast, in North America individuals typically show a strongself-regard regardless of whether it is assessed implicitly or explicitly.Self-Evaluations in Interdependent, Communal Social RelationsAt first glance, self- criticism at an explicit level is at odds with positive self-regarduncovered at an implicit level. Asians might therefore be “really” feeling good about themselvesat the deepest of their hearts, but they might at the same time be hiding the true feeling by actingmodest. Moreover, the distinction between private belief (“hon-ne”) and public position(“tatemae”) is explicitly encoded in the Japanese lexicon. And, of course, there is no doubt thatself-criticism is sometimes motivated by self-presentational concerns. However, this process,alone, cannot account for the finding that self-criticism in Asia is unlikely to be deliberatelycontrolled because it can be observed even under conditions of complete anonymity with5 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • klobuckfatima.xlx.pl