Self‐enhancement in Japan and America

Abstract

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.

Positive marital illusions and culture: American and Turkish spouses' perceptions of their marriages

“…This result also contrasts with the cultural moderation reported by Endo et al (2000) and Brown and Kobayashi (2002), who found that Japanese participants provided lower positive ratings of themselves, their relationships, and the generalized other than did North American respondents. This opens the interesting possibility that the form that cultural moderation takes may vary across cultures.…”

“…There is also an emerging literature comparing these illusions among North American and Asian populations. Although self-enhancement and relationship enhancement biases have been documented in Japanese (Brown & Kobayashi, 2002;Heine & Renshaw, 2002), Chinese (Falbo et al, 1997), Israeli, and Singaporean samples (Kurman & Sriram, 1997), the biases tend to be less pronounced in the Asian samples than in American samples. Our results add to this literature by indicating that cultural group moderates the extent of positive illusions when comparing U.S. and Turkish samples of individuals in consanguineous and nonconsanguineous marriages as well.…”

“…In contrast, the cultural moderation hypothesis of positive marital illusions that follows from Fowers and colleagues and others (Brown & Kobayashi, 2002;Endo et al, 2000) suggests that American spouses would have the strongest positive marital illusions, followed by spouses in nonconsanguineous marriages, with those in consanguineous marriages having the weakest positive illusions (i.e., an interaction of positivity perceptions and cultural group). This ordering also follows from Kagitcibasi's (2005) argument that greater interdependence in traditional families (material and psychological) would result in marriages that are focused more on pragmatic concerns and conformity to extended family expectations, whereas greater independence in families would result in marriages with a greater focus on the spouse's emotional evaluation of the relationship.…”

Group Inclusiveness, Group Identification, and Intergroup Attributional Bias

“…It has been argued that East Asians are willing to show intergroup attributional bias even though they do not always exhibit self-serving attributional bias at individual level (e.g., Brown & Kobayashi, 2002;Ma, 2003;Muramoto & Yamaguchi, 1997; but see also Heine, 2003). Empirical support for this contention, however, has not been sufficient especially in research referring to Chinese people.…”

Effects of Communicating Success With Friends on Self-Esteem in Japan and the United States

“…Data from cross-cultural studies have also supported this idea. For example, in one series of studies, Japanese were found to self-enhance on culturally important traits (Brown & Kobayashi, 2002;2003) and these findings were replicated and extended in another series of studies where Japanese were found to selfenhance on collectivistic traits, but not on individualistic traits (Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003). For a summary, including meta-analyses, of evidence for both sides of the debate on universal self-enhancement see Heine (2005), and Heine, Kitayama, & Hamamura (2007) and Sedikides, Gaertner, & Vevea (2005).…”