For all the significant ps reported in this article, p rep > .979. Volume 18-Number 6 499 S. Yamaguchi et al.

North Americans view themselves in more positive terms than they view most other people. In the present paper, we report three studies showing that this bias is also found in Japan. For highly valued traits and abilities, Japanese students rated themselves and their best friends in more positive terms than they rated most other students (Study 1 and Study 2) and most other Japanese (Study 2). In Study 3, a sample of older Japanese displayed the same tendency when evaluating themselves and a member of their family. We discuss the theoretical importance of the findings.

Although the self-enhancement motive is commonly held to be a universal human motivation, some theorists have recently argued that it does not operate in Japan. In an attempt to shed light on this issue, the authors conducted an investigation that explored the relation between self-esteem and self-enhancement in Japan and America. In both cultures and to the same degree, high self-esteem people were more apt to display evidence of self-enhancement than were low self-esteem people. The correspondence between the two cultures suggests that the self-enhancement motive does operate in Japan.

Past research on cross-cultural psychology has shown that North Americans have self-enhancing attitudes, evaluating themselves more favorably than others, including friends. The present research identifies a discrepancy — this self-enhancement in relation to friends did not appear when measured implicitly. Using American and Japanese university students as subjects, the present studies investigated responses to explicit (self-report) and implicit measures (the Implicit Association Test) toward three targets: self, best friends, and fellow university students. Results revealed that North Americans showed more positive implicit attitudes toward best friends than toward self, a very different pattern from the explicit results. For the Japanese, best friends were evaluated slightly more positively than the self on implicit measures, which contrasted with previous findings with explicit measures that showed best friends being evaluated more positively.

In his commentary, Heine has done a thorough job of reviewing research on selfenhancement biases in Japan. Insofar as he conducted much of the work he reviewed, we assume he has characterized the findings fairly and accurately and see no need to comment further upon them. Instead, we will take this opportunity to discuss the nature of self-enhancement more generally, including its affective basis and its manifestation in different cultural contexts. In so doing, we hope to clarify the manner in which Japanese satisfy their self-enhancement needs. The search for basic human motivationsTwo research areas are currently quite popular in personality and social psychology. One seeks to identify basic elements of human experience that have been shaped by evolutionary forces and manifest themselves across diverse cultures (Buss & Kenrick, 1998). Representative of this approach is Ekman's research on cross-cultural recognition of facial expressions (Ekman, 1994) and Buss's research on sex differences in sexual mating strategies (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). Among the goals of this research enterprise is the demonstration that certain psychological processes are pancultural and can be observed in virtually all human societies.A second research area studies cross-cultural differences in human behavior (Fiske et al., 1998). Instead of focusing on psychological phenomena that can be observed across cultures, researchers working in this tradition study cross-cultural differences. Diener's work on the correlates of subjective well-being (Diener & Diener, 1995) and Nisbett's research on analytic versus holistic modes of thought exemplify this approach (Nisbett et al., 2001).With their respective emphases on pancultural processes and culturally circumscribed ones, these two research areas would seem to be inextricably antagonistic. This is not so. Many cross-cultural researchers strive to identify how cultures shape the expression of basic human motives. From this perspective, there exist a certain, specifiable number of human motives that manifest themselves in different ways in different cultures. As an obvious example, people everywhere need to eat, but the foods they eat and the way they prepare the food and partake of it varies a great deal from culture to culture.