Culture, method, and the content of self-concepts: Testing trait, individual–self-primacy, and cultural psychology perspectives

Abstract

Three theoretical perspectives on cultural universals and differences in the content of self-concepts were tested in individualistic (United States, n = 178; Australia, n = 112) and collectivistic (Mexico, n = 157; Philippines, n = 138) cultures, using three methods of self-concept assessment. Support was found for both trait perspectives and the individual-self-primacy hypothesis. In contrast, support for cultural psychology hypotheses was limited because traits and other personal attributes were not more salient, or social attributes less salient, in individualistic cultures than collectivistic cultures. The salience of some aspects of self-concept depended on the method of assessment, calling into question conclusions based on monomethod studies.

The use of traits and contextual information in free personality descriptions across ethnocultural groups in South Africa.

“…This becomes evident when one considers the preferred categories of personality description beyond traits, the contextualization of descriptions, the role of social distance from the described person, and the substantiation of differences across personality domains. We found that Blacks made more descriptions using behaviors, preferences, and relational contextualization than the other groups (however, all three groups made few references to social roles and identities); they used the fewest traits for self-descriptions but had overall small differences across social distance; they used relatively few traits and little contextualizing information for agentic descriptions and and communal descriptions (Del Prado et al, 2007;Sedikides et al, 2005) and the psycholexical hypothesis (Saucier & Goldberg, 2001). This integration of different perspectives is in line with efforts to bring the study of trait use beyond the juxtaposition of the trait and cultural psychology perspectives (Church, 2000(Church, , 2009.…”

“…We started with an examination of agency-communion, which are broad constructs that have been suggested to capture substantial cross-cultural differences in personality descriptions (Del Prado et al, 2007;Sedikides et al, 2005).…”

“…People in collectivistic cultures, as opposed to those in individualistic cultures, tend to describe personality and behavior less in abstract trait terms and more in terms of specific behaviors embedded in specific contexts, and in terms of social roles and identities (Markus & Kitayama, 1998). Such differences have been documented most widely for self-descriptions using open-ended measures like the Twenty Statements Test (TST) where participants are asked to complete the sentence -I am…‖ up to 20 times (e.g., Cousins, 1989;Rhee, Uleman, Lee, & Roman, 1995), but also using other methods and target persons (Del Prado et al, 2007). There is also a line of research that has demonstrated crosscultural differences in causal attributions, where people in collectivistic cultures, as opposed to those in individualistic cultures, tend to attribute behaviors more strongly to situational rather than dispositional (that is, trait) factors (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999).…”

“…Their implications and empirical support have been studied systematically in a series of publications by Church and colleagues (Church, 2000(Church, , 2009(Church, , 2010Church, Anderson-Harumi, et al, 2008;Church, Katigbak, et al, 2008;Church et al, 2003;Del Prado et al, 2007). In short, there are mixed findings supporting aspects of both perspectives, with a preponderance of support for the trait perspective, especially among non-Asian populations (Del Prado et al, 2007; for reviews of the topic, see also Benet-Martínez & Oishi, 2008;Church, 2009Church, , 2010Heine & Buchtel, 2009;Triandis & Suh, 2002). The present study aims to contribute to this literature by (a) extending it to the largely understudied African context while employing a more graded than the usual dichotomous approach to individualismcollectivism; (b) addressing the role of social distance for cross-cultural differences; and (c) investigating the interplay of these differences with domains of personality, to identify the domains with the most pronounced differences.…”

Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self: Hierarchical Ordering of the Tripartite Self

“…In self-description tasks, participants write a higher proportion of individual-self aspects than collectiveself aspects. That pattern replicates across (a) participants both with an independent and interdependent self-construal (Gaertner et al 1999, Investigation 4), (b) Chinese and American or Canadian participants (Ross et al 2002;Trafimow et al 1991), Philippino, Mexican, Australian, and American participants (del Prado et al 2007), and (c) experimenter-activated priming of individual and collective self (Trafimow et al 1991;Ybarra and Trafimow 1998, Experiment 3). Moreover, at the implicit level, participants from the US, China, and Japan evaluate the individual self more positively than the relational friend (i.e., best friend) or the collective self (i.e., ingroup member) (Yamaguchi et al 2007).…”