2001/01/01 by Chie Kanagawa, Susan E. Cross, Hazel Rose Markus · 452 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cultural Differences and Values #Social and Intergroup Psychology #International Student and Expatriate Challenges #Psychology #Social psychology #Situational ethics #Normative #Self #Self-concept #Valence (chemistry) #Social comparison theory #Developmental psychology #Epistemology
paper · doi:10.1177/0146167201271008
published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27(1), 90-103 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
This study investigated whether self-concepts that arise from participation in interdependent cultural contexts, in this case the self-concepts of Japanese students, will be relatively more sensitive to situational variation than will self-concepts that arise in independent cultural contexts, in this case the self-concepts of U.S. college students. The self-concepts of 128 Japanese and 133 U.S. women were assessed in one of four distinct social situations: in a group, with a faculty member, with a peer, and alone in a research booth. Furthermore, the authors examined the hypothesis that Japanese self-concepts would differ from American self-concepts in valence, reflecting normative and desirable tendencies toward self-criticism. American and Japanese participants differed in the content, number, and range of self-descriptions. As predicted, the situation had a greater influence on the self-descriptions of the Japanese participants than on the Americans’ self-descriptions, and the self-descriptions of the Japanese were more negative.