Self and Personality

Self-Concept
• How we perceive ourselves, and
understand our identity plays a crucial
role in how we think about many things.
• The self-concept is implicated in:
• directing what information we should
attend to,
• how we derive meaning from events,
• the kinds of relationships that we have,
• our emotions,
• what we are motivated to work
towards.
Who Am I?
• People are asked to describe
themselves with a number of
statements that begin with “I
am _______.”
• The kinds of statements that
they list are then counted and
analyzed.
• People from some different
cultural groups often provide
different kinds of statements.
 Structure of the Self

• Comparison of American college students

vs. various groups in Kenya.
Independent vs. Interdependent
Views of Self
• Seminal paper by Markus and
Kitayama (1991).
• Argued that much of what is known
in social psychology, has been
studied with people who share a
primarily distinct view of self - an
independent self.
• In much of the non-Western world,
in contrast, an interdependent self is
more common.
Independent View of Self
• Identity is experienced as largely
independent from others.
• Important aspects of identity are
personal characteristics.
• Identity remains largely constant
across roles and situations.
• Considerable fluidity between
ingroups and outgroups.
Interdependent View of Self
• Individual’s identity is importantly
interdependent with others.
• Key aspects of identity include roles,
relationships, and memberships.
• As roles change across situations,
identity is also somewhat fluid across
situations.
• Clear distinction between ingroups and
outgroups.
• How do people represent close
relationships?

• One study asked Chinese and

American students to either
think about how well adjectives
describe themselves, their
mothers, or another target (Zhu
et al., 2007).

• They did this while in an fMRI

scanner.
• Figure shows the differences in brain activation when people thought of
themselves compared with when they thought of their mothers.

• Americans showed different activation patterns - mother and self were

represented in different regions.

• Chinese areas of activation for mother and self were identical.

• No cultural differences in representations of other targets (not shown in
this image).
 Social Class and Self-Concept
• Within countries groups also vary in
their self-concepts.
• The wealthier and better educated
groups tend to be more independent
than the poorer and less educated
groups.
• Many of the cross-cultural findings
discussed in this course also hold
for comparisons of wealthy and
poor within the West.
• Studying university students means
our samples are more independent
than if we targeted other groups.
 Self-Consistency
• The interdependent self should be more contextually variable
than the independent self.

• If the identity of the interdependent self is importantly

grounded in roles, than across situations, identity should
vary.
• In one study, Japanese and American students completed the
Twenty Statements Test in different situations (Kanagawa et
al., 2001).

• There were 4 test-taking situations: alone, with peers, in a

professor’s office, and in a large class.

• The key variable of interest was how similarly positive were

people’s self-descriptions across situations.
 American Data

Ratio of Positive to Negative Statements

• American self-
4

descriptions were highly

similar across different 3
situations.
2
• Their self-descriptions
were also uniformly 1
positive.
0
Pro- Peers Class Alone
fessor
 Japanese Data
• Japanese self-descriptions 2.0
varied significantly across

Ratio of Positive to Negative Statements

different situations.
1.5

• They were more positive

when alone and most 1.0
critical when with their
professor.
0.5
• Their self-descriptions
were also less positive than
0.0
the Americans. Pro- Peers Class Alone
fessor
 Self-Awareness
• In one study Canadian participants indicated whether their
memories contained 1st person or 3rd person imagery for a
variety of events.

• In some of the events they were the center of attention (e.g.,

your birthday party) and some they were not the center of
attention (e.g., watching a movie with friends).
• Why do we see these cultural differences?

• Being a member of an interdependent group makes it

more important for one to understand how others are
viewing them.

• It is others’ opinions about one that especially matter

for one to be successful in interdependent contexts.
• Research on self-awareness reveals
that people oscillate between two
states of awareness.

• In a state of subjective self-

awareness people are taking on
the perspective of a subject - an
“I.” They are in the position of
being the judge and can evaluate
themselves according to their own
standards.
• In a state of objective self-
awareness, people experience
themselves as an object - a “me.”
They are aware of being evaluated
by the standards of others.
• If East Asians tend to habitually consider themselves from the
perspective of others, they may tend to view themselves more
often in a state of objective self-awareness.

• As such, manipulations of objective self-awareness should

have less impact on East Asians. They are habitually
considering themselves in terms of how they appear to others.

• Objective self-awareness is often manipulated by putting

people in front of mirrors, where they can see themselves as
the world sees them.
• In a study of ours, we had Japanese and
American students evaluate themselves with
a measure of actual-ideal self-discrepancies.
A larger discrepancy indicates a more self-
critical view.

• Half completed the questionnaire in front of

a mirror. The other half did not (see Heine
et al., 2008).
 Mirrors and Self-Discrepancies
• Americans had larger self-
1.3
discrepancies (i.e., are more No Mirror Mirror
self-critical) when in front of a 1.2
mirror than when not.

Self-Discrepancies
1.1
• Japanese were unaffected by the
mirror. 1.0

• When Americans were in front 0.9

of a mirror they seemed to think 0.8

of themselves in ways more
similar to that of Japanese. 0.7
USA Japan
• Suggests people understand
themselves in different ways
across cultures.

• An “Outside-In” perspective is
more common in Asia, whereas
an “Inside-Out” perspective is
more common in the West.

• What other kinds of experiences

might vary because of this
difference?
 Incremental vs. Entity Theories of Self

• Incremental theories of self involve the belief that abilities are

malleable and are capable of being changed, with efforts.
• Entity theories of self involve the belief that abilities are largely fixed,
and reflect innate features of the self.
• People with more interdependent selves have more incremental and
less entity-based theories of self.
 Universal Potential of Intelligence
100
Universal Intelligence
Intelligence is Only for the Few
80

Percent of People Agreeing

• Indians are more likely than
60
Americans to believe that anyone
can become highly intelligent.
40

• When Americans are led to believe

20
that high intelligence is widely
attainable, they become more
supportive of gov’t policies to 0
USA India
distribute income more evenly.
Rattan, Savani, Naidu, & Dweck, 2012
• When people have different theories of the nature of abilities,
they respond differently to feedback about their abilities.

• We conducted a study where we had Japanese and American

students take a bogus creativity test which was rigged such that
everyone did poorly (Heine et al., 2001).

• Example item: Which word goes with the following three?

meal deal peg ______

• After they had found out that they had done poorly they were
left alone with a second version of the test and their persistence
on the test was assessed.
• The second test came with one of three sets of instructions which were the
independent variable.

• One set of instructions explained that performance on the creativity test was
based on an incremental theory - efforts improve one’s score.

• A second set of instructions provided an entity theory - some people are just
naturally good at the test, and some people aren’t.

• A third condition was a control condition and contained no instructions.

The dependent variable was how long people would persist after receiving
these different instructions.
Persistence Time after Failure (in seconds),
Depending on Theory of Abilities
• For American participants,
they persisted as long when
800 USA
they received entity
instructions as when they 750

received no instructions. 700

This suggests that they the 650
entity instructions conveyed 600
no new information to 550
them. 500
450
• In contrast, the incremental 400
instructions affected their 350
behavior and made them Incremen- None Entity
persist more. tal
Instructions
Persistence Time after Failure (in seconds),
Depending on Theory of Abilities
• For Japanese participants,
they persisted as long when
800 USA Japan
they received incremental
instructions as when they 750

received no instructions. 700

This suggests that the 650
incremental instructions 600
conveyed no new 550
information to them. 500
450
• In contrast, the entity 400
instructions affected their 350
behavior and made them Incremen- None Entity
persist less. tal
Instructions
Persistence Time after Failure (in seconds),
Depending on Theory of Abilities
• Overall, Japanese persisted
longer in the face of failure
800 USA Japan
than Americans, which
suggests that they have 750

more incremental theories. 700

650
• When Japanese are given 600
American ideas (i.e., entity 550
theories) they act more like 500
Americans. And when 450
Americans are given 400
Japanese ideas (i.e., 350
incremental theories) they Incremen- None Entity
act more like Japanese. tal
Instructions
• Abilities are perceived very differently when they
are seen as malleable vs. fixed.

• Cultures differ in whether they think of their self

as a changing process vs. a largely set product.

• How else might we expect the cultures to differ

because of these different views of abilities?
 Personality

• People everywhere do think of each other in terms of

underlying personalities.
• This appears to be even more true among Westerners (e.g.,
recall Twenty Statements Test)
Personality Structure
• There are thousands of personality trait terms in
the English language. However, almost all of
these tend to be related to five underlying
personality factors.
• The Five Factor Model of Personality argues that
there are five core traits that universally represent
personality (Costa & McCrae, 1992).
• Openness to experience, Conscientiousness,
Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
How Universal is Personality Structure?
• Students in 50 different cultures have completed the
Big 5 questionnaire, and a highly similar factor
structure has emerged in each culture.

• However, this research has all been based on

translations of English personality terms. Would the
same set of personality factors emerge from
indigenous personality traits?

v
• Investigations in a number of cultures, including
s. Spain, Greece, the Philippines, and China have
found most of the Big 5 factors, but also some
additional factors.

• The results do not support the Big 5 well in small-

scale subsistence societies. This may reflect that
only complex societies lead to the Big 5, however,
the quality of the data is poor and difficult to
 Niche-Diversity Hypothesis

• Societies with more niches may encourage people to cultivate

unique skillsets and traits.
• Societies with more niches have slightly larger number of
underlying personality factors.
• If societies continue to get more complex, perhaps we’ll see
evidence for more personality traits (but highly speculative).
• In summary, personality structure appears to be
largely similar around the world, with a possible
exception of small-scale societies that remains
somewhat unclear.

• Moreover, there may be some significant cultural

variation depending on the language that personality
traits are derived from.