Self as Cultural Product:

An Examination of East Asian

and North American Selves

Steven J. Heine
University of British Columbia

ABSTRACT In the past decade a wealth of research has been conducted on

the cultural foundation of the self-concept, particularly with respect to East
Asian and North American selves. The present paper discusses how the self
differs across these two cultural contexts, particularly with respect to an empha-
sis on consistency versus flexibility, an intraindividual versus an extraindividual
focus, the malleability of the self versus world, the relation of self to others, and
self-enhancing versus self-critical motivations. These differences reveal the
manifold ways that culture shapes the self.

The study of the self has been an irresistible preoccupation of personality

and social psychologists. Questions such as “How do people view
themselves?” “How do people evaluate themselves?” and “How do
people explain their behavior?” have traditionally been significant con-
cerns. About a decade ago, when Triandis (1989) and Markus and
Kitayama (1991) called the attention of personality and social psycholo-
gists to the cultural variation between East Asian and North American
views of self, renewed interest emerged for the concern: “How does the
self come to be?” A growing body of theory and research, particularly
with respect to comparisons of East Asians and North Americans, has

This research was funded by start-up funds from the University of Pennsylvania and a
Japan Foundation Fellowship. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed
to Steven J. Heine at the Department of Psychology, 2136 West Mall, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 124 Canada. E-mail can be sent to [email protected].
Journal of Personality 69:6, December 2001.
Copyright © 2001 by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,
USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
882 Heine

lent support to the idea that in many respects the self is a cultural
construction. This paper seeks to further articulate the nature of East
Asian and North American varieties of self by sampling the fruits of a
decade of research on this topic.

Self at the Intersection of Individual and Culture

Cultural psychology shares and challenges some implicit assumptions
regarding the person embraced by more mainstream personality psychol-
ogy. Similar to mainstream personality psychology, cultural psychology
views the person as containing a set of biological potentials interacting
within particular situational contexts that constrain and afford the expres-
sion of various constellations of traits and patterns of behavior. Unlike
much of personality psychology, however, cultural psychology focuses
on the constraints and affordances inherent in the cultural environment
that give shape to those biological potentials.
Cultural psychologists focus on one aspect of humans that is unique
among all species: the extent of our dependence on culture. Relative to
other species, the requisite base of instinctual knowledge that humans
possess is a small proportion of our repertoire of actions and behaviors.
Geertz (1973) argues that we are born into an “information gap” —the
large discrepancy between the amount of information that is hardwired
into us at birth and the amount that we need to survive. We have evolved
to be dependent on cultural systems of meaning to fill this gap. As we
develop, we are highly receptive to seizing and accommodating to the
cultural meanings that envelop us (Shweder, 1990). Importantly, these
are not generic sets of cultural meanings that we respond to, but highly
specific forms of them. The universal mind that is made up of our
common biological ancestry emerges in multiple mentalities in its par-
ticular cultural manifestations (Shweder et al., 1998).
Cultural psychology is the study of the process by which biological
entities become meaningful ones (Markus & Kitayama, 1998). Its key
assumption is that the self is not so inflexibly hardwired into the cortex
that it appears in invariant forms across cultural contexts. Rather, the self
is seen to arise from biological potentials becoming attuned to the
particular cultural meaning system within which the individual develops.
Likewise, cultures come to be through the processes by which humans
interact with and seize meanings and resources from them. In this way,
culture and self can be said to be mutually constituted (Shweder, 1990).
Self as Cultural Product 883

This view of the mutual constitution of self and culture is not shared
by all disciplines that study culture and psychology. For example, “cross-
cultural psychology” carries the assumption that culture exists as largely
separate from the individual, and is likened to an independent variable
impacting on the dependent variable of personality (e.g., Church &
Lonner, 1998; Greenfield, 1997). A frequent goal of cross-cultural psy-
chology is to reveal the “universal psychology” that is believed to exist
beneath our motley cultural dressings (e.g., Lonner, 1980; Triandis,
1996). Culture is seen as a force separate from the individual that
influences and distorts the universal personality lying below.
A number of research paradigms of cross-cultural psychology owe
much of their intellectual heritage to personality psychology. This ances-
try is especially evident in some of the methodologies that have become
de rigueur in the field. Culture at the national level is typically treated in
similar ways as personality is at the individual level. A prototypical
approach of cross-cultural psychology is to employ data reduction tech-
niques in an analysis of survey data that has been collected across a broad
range of different countries—Hofstede’s (1980) study of IBM employees
being the most well known example. The paramount goal of this approach
is to explain and predict cultural variation by creating a taxonomy of the
key cultural syndromes (Triandis, 1996), revealing something akin to the
“Big 5” of culture.
Cultural psychology, in contrast, is not in search of a universal human
nature, and indeed embraces the assumption that much less of psychol-
ogy is universal than is typically thought. That human nature is seen as
emerging from participation in cultural worlds, and of adapting oneself
to the imperatives of cultural directives, means that our nature is ulti-
mately that of a cultural being. Our common evolutionary ancestry
certainly dictates that as a species we share some important concerns;
however, this does not mean that their development and expression as
psychological structures and processes are not affected by culture. More-
over, it seems that some of these concerns, such as reasoning styles
(Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001) or feelings of positive
self-regard (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999), are more
amenable to cultural influences than others, such as preferences for
symmetry (Langlois & Roggman, 1990), or fears of parental uncertainty
(Buss, 1996). In particular, the self-concept is excellent terrain to explore
the artifacts of culture.
884 Heine

Cultural psychology does not view culture as a superficial wrapping

of the self, or as a framework within which selves interact, but as
something that is intrinsic to the self. It assumes that without culture there
is no self, only a biological entity deprived of its potential (Geertz, 1973).
Individual selves are inextricably grounded in a configuration of consen-
sual understandings and behavioral customs particular to a given cultural
and historical context. Hence, understanding the self requires an under-
standing of the culture that sustains it. Cultural psychologists are thus
more likely to prefer methodologies that examine the self in situ and tend
to interpret their findings within the context of the culture under study
(e.g., Greenfield, 1997).

Features of North American

and East Asian Selves
This paper reviews literature conducted in two broad cultural contexts,
those from largely European middle-class backgrounds of Canada and
the United States, and those with a significant Confucian heritage (spe-
cifically, China, Japan, and Korea). For the purpose of brevity, I will refer
to these two cultural groups as “North American” and “East Asian”
throughout this paper. Clearly, there is much variability among the
different cultures encompassed by these labels, and even more variability
among individuals living in those cultures. Moreover, the psychological
processes, which I describe in this review, certainly exist within all
individuals, varying in degree and depending on context. Throughout this
paper, I refer to dichotomies of culture and psychological phenomena in
order to highlight broad patterns by which we can identify the influence
of culture on self.
These two cultural groups have been selected as they are most repre-
sented in the literature comparing the self-concept cross-culturally over
the past decade, and a number of authors have described them as
theoretically distinct (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989).
There is much evidence to suggest that American culture represents a
rather extreme case of individualism. The United States was founded on
an ideology that emphasizes the importance of self-determination and
individual rights. Lipset (1996) documents the variety of ways that U.S.
culture is a clear outlier in terms of cultural and social markers of
individualism: for example, his cross-national comparisons reveal that
the United States is the only industrialized nation never to have a viable
Self as Cultural Product 885

socialist movement; it has the world’s highest productivity per capita, the
highest divorce rate, the highest crime rate among industrialized nations,
the greatest number of offices that are open for election and the greatest
frequency with which these elections are held, the highest rates of
litigiousness, and among the highest rates of volunteerism and individual
philanthropy. It seems reasonable to conclude that at present individual-
ism exists in no purer form than it does in the United States. The extreme
nature of American individualism suggests that a psychology based on
late 20th century American research not only stands the risk of develop-
ing models that are particular to that culture, but also of developing an
understanding of the self that is peculiar in the context of the world’s
cultures (Geertz, 1975). Canada appears considerably less individualistic
than the United States along these dimensions, although a reasonable
argument could be made that Canada more closely resembles the United
States culturally and psychologically than any other nation.
China, Japan, and Korea, although each culturally distinct from one
another in many ways, share a number of cultural elements that provide
a theoretically meaningful contrast with North American independent
selves. The East Asian self is typically described as being collectivistic
or interdependent, reflecting the significant role of relationships with
ingroup members in the construction of the self (e.g., Markus &
Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989). In particular, this interdependence is
shaped by their common Confucian heritage. Central among Confucian-
ism is the value placed on the maintenance of interpersonal harmony
within one’s five cardinal relationships: father-son, husband-wife, elder-
younger, emperor-subject, and friend-friend (Su et al., 1999). The roles
associated with these relationships each bear specific obligations, and the
roles themselves are relatively fixed within each relationship. For har-
mony to be achieved within any hierarchical unit, it is essential for
individuals’ actions to correspond with their roles. It requires individuals
to know their place and to act accordingly.
Cultural psychology maintains that the process of becoming a self is
contingent on individuals interacting with and seizing meanings from the
cultural environment. Thus, the resultant self-concept that will emerge
from participating in highly individualized North American culture will
differ importantly from the self-concept that results from the participa-
tion in the Confucian interdependence of East Asian culture. Below I
discuss some psychological dimensions by which these two cultural
groups diverge.
886 Heine

Consistency Versus Flexibility

In contrast to East Asian interdependent selves, the North American
independent self can be seen as a relatively bounded and autonomous
entity, complete in and of itself, existing separately from others and the
surrounding social context (Geertz, 1975; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).
Individual selves are perceived of as similar to objects in that they are
viewed as whole, unified, integrated, stable, and inviolate entities
(Shweder et al., 1998). Such a view assumes that, although situations
may activate different aspects of the working self-concept (Markus &
Kunda, 1986), core representations of the self remain largely uninflu-
enced by the presence of others. The self is experienced as relatively
unchanging and constant across situations.
This view of an inviolate self existing largely independent of its context
has spawned a number of theories regarding the consistency of the self
(e.g., Festinger, 1957; Heider, 1958; M. Ross, 1989; Swann, Wenzlaff,
Krull, & Pelham, 1992). These various research paradigms tend to reveal
that North Americans are willing to make rather costly sacrifices in order
to preserve a semblance of self-consistency. Moreover, the premium
placed on a consistent self is further evident in some Western theorists’
discussions of psychological health (for a review see Suh, 2001). Com-
mon among many Western theories is the view that psychological health
is associated with a consistent and integrated knowledge of oneself
(Jourard, 1965; Maslow, 1954).
In contrast, the functional value of consistency is less clear for East
Asian selves. The East Asian self is described as largely a relational
phenomenon (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Kanagawa, Cross, & Markus,
2001), where an individual’s relationships and roles take precedence over
abstracted and internalized attributes, such as attitudes, traits, and abili-
ties. Hence, changing situations will find the East Asian self in new roles
bearing different obligations. It is important for the East Asian self to be
able to determine what the role requirements are for a given situation and
to adjust itself accordingly. The ability to distinguish between the de-
mands across situations (kejime in Japanese) is viewed as integral to an
individual’s maturity (Bachnik, 1992), and is a major pedagogical focus
of Japanese schools (Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989).
Much empirical research supports this cultural distinction regard-
ing the prevalence of consistent self-views. Bond and Cheung (1983)
found that Japanese respondents tended not to describe themselves by
Self as Cultural Product 887

abstracting features across situations, in contrast to American tendencies

to view themselves more in terms of pure psychological attributes. Other
research has found that East Asians are more likely than Americans to
describe themselves with reference to social roles or memberships,
aspects of identity that are fluid with respect to the situation that one is
in (Cousins, 1989; Rhee, Uleman, Lee, & Roman, 1995).
The cross-situational fluidity of the East Asian self has been demon-
strated in a variety of different paradigms. Kanagawa et al. (2001) found
that Japanese (but not American) self-descriptions varied significantly
depending on who was in the room with them when they completed their
questionnaires. For example, participants became significantly more
self-critical in front of a professor than when they were alone. Similarly,
Suh (2001) asked Koreans and Americans to evaluate themselves on a
number of traits in a number of hypothetical situations. The Americans
showed relatively little change in their self-descriptions across situations,
whereas Koreans viewed themselves in highly variable terms.
The view that consistency is associated with psychological well-being
is less evident in East Asia. Suh (2001) found that, whereas consistency
across situations was associated with greater degrees of well-being for
Americans, this relation was far weaker for Koreans. Similarly, Campbell
et al. (1996) found a weaker correlation between Japanese participants’
self-concept clarity (a construct that captures the consistency of the self
across situations and time) and self-esteem than was found for Canadi-
ans. Well-being and positive feelings about the self do not seem to be as
tethered to a consistent identity for East Asians as they do for North
Americans.
A relatively attenuated motivation for consistency among East Asians
is also evident in their weaker beliefs in attitude-behavior consistency
(Kashima, Siegal, Tanaka, & Kashima, 1992). Moreover, social psychol-
ogy’s favorite consistency theory, cognitive dissonance, finds little evi-
dence to support it in East Asia (Heine & Lehman, 1997b). The drive for
consistency that underlies dissonance may be weak enough among East
Asians that attempts to rationalize their behaviors are not a common part
of their everyday experience.
Cultural differences in a preference for consistency are not limited to
individuals’ understanding of themselves. Research on cognition shows
that Westerners will go to great lengths to avoid contradictions in their
reasoning (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). When presented with arguments that
appear to be contradictory, Americans eliminate the contradiction by
888 Heine

selecting the better argument and become even more convinced that it is
correct than they do when they are not presented with the challenging
statement. This drive for consistency bears the cost that potentially useful
information may be downplayed or ignored. Chinese, in stark contrast,
appear to accept contradiction as a natural part of life. When presented
with two contradictory arguments they tend to accept both and make no
effort to resolve the inconsistency. In fact, Chinese demonstrate a peculiar
strategy whereby they are more likely to prefer a weak argument if it is
paired with a contradictory stronger argument than when it is encoun-
tered alone (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). The world is viewed in different
terms when it is not forced to fit into a consistent and noncontradictory
narrative.

Intraindividual Versus Extraindividual Focus

To the extent that East Asians are more likely to view their selves as
changing across different situations, their ability to understand and
predict the behavior of others (and themselves) would seem to hinge on
different sources of information than that relied on by relatively invariant
North American selves. Situational information should be of greater
utility for East Asians as it is more highly correlated with an individual’s
behavior, and they should thus be more likely to attend to it. Likewise,
although dispositions appear to be meaningful ways of conceptualizing
aspects of individuals universally (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999;
Church, 2000), dispositional information should be more predictive of
an individual’s behavior among North Americans than East Asians and
should receive greater elaboration there. Indeed, to the extent that infor-
mation exists either within or outside an individual, the more attention
people devote to the situation, the less they will attend to dispositions.
Evidence for an exaggerated preference for dispositional information
among North Americans can be seen in studies of the “fundamental
attribution error” (Ross, 1977). These studies have found that people
(usually North Americans) are reluctant to consider information external
to the individual in explaining the behavior of others. North Americans
hold the lay theory that behavior is largely a product of the personalities
of the people engaged in it.
East Asians also attend to dispositions of individuals (Choi et al., 1999);
however, there is evidence that they do so less than North Americans. East
Asians are less likely than North Americans to describe themselves in
Self as Cultural Product 889

abstract trait terms (Bond & Cheung, 1983; Cousins, 1989; Rhee et al.,
1995), although they are equally able to think abstractly. Traits are clearly
useful ways to describe personality in all cultures (Church, 2000),
although some research finds that people in Western culture are more
likely to spontaneously generate trait descriptions for other’s behaviors
(Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994).
Much evidence suggests that East Asians are less likely than North
Americans to make attributions on the basis of dispositional informa-
tion (e.g., Morris & Peng, 1994; Van Boven, Kamada, & Gilovitch,
1999). For example, although correspondent bias studies show that
East Asians, like North Americans, tend to disregard key situational
information (Krull et al., 1999), they are more malleable in this regard.
When the situation is made highly salient, East Asians will take this
information into account, unlike North Americans (Choi & Nisbett, 1998;
Kitayama & Masuda, 1997). Useful as dispositions are for East Asians
in making sense of others’ behaviors, they can be trumped by the
situation, something that has not been found with North Americans.
This heightened attention to the surrounding field is also evident in the
ways that East Asians attend to their environment. East Asians demon-
strate more field dependence than North Americans (being less able to
distinguish an object from the surrounding environment), and they are
better able to detect covariation between events (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett,
2000). When looking at a scene of fish, Japanese are more likely than
Americans to notice elements from the background, and to have their
recall of the fish affected by changes in the background (Masuda, 1999).
In sum, East Asians are less likely than North Americans to distinguish
figure from ground.
Cultural differences in tendencies to habitually focus outside of the
individual suggest differences in emotional experience across cultures.
The locus of emotions, too, can be seen as located either largely inside
or outside the individual. Kitayama, Markus, and Kurokawa (2000)
found that Japanese were more likely than Americans to experience
interpersonally engaged emotions (emotions that emphasize one’s con-
nection with others, e.g., respect, shame) relative to their experience of
interpersonally disengaged emotions (emotions emphasizing one’s dis-
tance from others, e.g., anger, pride). That is, American emotional
experience is more likely than Japanese to be viewed as an event isolated
within the individual.
890 Heine

Moreover, to the extent that emotions, in general, tend to be a source

of intraindividual information relevant to behavior, in contrast to the
various sources of extraindividual information that individuals receive
from the situation, East Asians might be less likely to attend to, or even
notice, their emotions. Mesquita and Karasawa (in press) found that in
time samplings of Japanese and Americans, Japanese were over three
times as likely as Americans to report that they were not feeling any
emotion at the time. Similarly, other research has found that Japanese
report feeling emotions less intensely and for shorter durations than do
Americans (Matsumoto, Kudoh, Scherer, & Walbott, 1988). It would
seem that North Americans, with their dispositional theory of behavior,
would develop heightened sensitivities to detect any changes in their
inner state, whereas East Asians would have a greater proportion of their
attentional resources devoted to others and the surrounding environment.
However, it is important to note that there is perhaps no field of research
where the debate over evidence for cross-cultural variation is more heated
than in research on emotions (e.g., Church & Lonner, 1998; Levenson,
Ekman, Heider, & Friesen, 1992; Mesquita & Frijda, 1992; Shweder,
1994).

Malleability of Self Versus Malleability

of the World
Becoming a self involves identifying the boundary between the self and
the surrounding environment. This paper has thus far focused exclusively
on how culture affects our understanding of the self, but implicit in the
construction of self is the construction of what is not self: specifically,
the social world within which the self performs. We possess lay theories
regarding the nature of both the self and the world. One aspect of these
theories is that they emphasize the relative fluidity and malleability of
these two opposing forces. To the extent that different cultures perceive
the relative malleability of selves and social worlds in divergent ways,
they will possess different theories about how individuals can, should,
and do act.
Westerners tend to stress the malleability of the world relative to the
self (Su et al., 1999). God told Adam that he would have dominion over
all the earth; the world was there for humans to change and use to their
liking. This belief persists in the West, and is manifest in the view that
the individual has potential control of shaping the world to fit his or her
Self as Cultural Product 891

own desires. In contrast, the Western self, as discussed above, is relatively

immutable and consistent. This view that the self is an immutable entity,
working within the context of a mutable world, highlights a particular
perception of individual agency.
The East Asian scale of malleability, in contrast, weighs more heavily
on the self end. As discussed above, the individual self occupies various
roles with respect to the relationships that they have with others, and
needs to be fluid enough to be able to adapt to different role expectations
and situational demands. In contrast to the fluidity of the self, however,
these roles are relatively immutable (Su et al., 1999). The social world is
viewed as enduring and permanent, influenced by forces beyond the
individual (cf. Chiu, Dweck, Tong, & Fu, 1997, Study 5). When the
balance of malleability shifts away from the social world and towards the
self, perceptions of control and agency will be muted. The social world
is not at the individual’s disposal to alter to fit his or her needs. Rather,
the flexible individual must accommodate to the inflexible social world
and must learn what aspects of themselves need to be changed in order
to fit in (Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, in press).
Weisz, Rothbaum, and Blackburn (1984) propose that there are two
ways of exerting control that are exercised depending on the relative
malleability of the self versus the world. When the world is more mutable
than the self, people demonstrate agency via “primary control,” by
striving to make the world fit their individual desires. In contrast, when
the world is more fixed than the self, people demonstrate agency via
“secondary control” and strive to adjust themselves to fit in with the
situational demands.
The North American self largely rests on a foundation of a distinctive
set of qualities and processes, and this configuration of inner attributes
is seen to largely determine or cause behavior. Participation in North
American culture encourages a sense of self as “in control,” and indi-
viduals strive to shape the world to accommodate their inner desires
through practices such as expressing preferences and making choices
(Iyengar & Lepper, 1999), or trying to change other’s behavior to improve
their lives (Morling et al., in press). In contrast, the East Asian interde-
pendent self is suspended in a web of social relationships and roles. With
this view of self, the individual must be responsive to the needs of others
and the obligations associated with their roles. Participation in East Asian
culture encourages one to harmonize with others and to adjust oneself to
the social environment (Morling et al., in press).
892 Heine

Much cross-cultural research has identified differences in control

consistent with this view. Comparisons of locus of control scales consis-
tently reveal that East Asians exhibit less of an internal locus of control
than do North Americans (e.g. Bond & Tornatzky, 1973). Canadians
perceive threatening future life events to be more under their control than
do Japanese (Heine & Lehman, 1995). Iyengar and Lepper (1999) found
that East Asian children were more willing to surrender their individual
choices to their mothers than were Euro-American children. Morling et
al. (in press) demonstrated that adjusting situations are more common in
Japan, and controlling situations are more common in the United States,
and that Japanese-made situations enhance respondents’ feelings of
relatedness, whereas American-made situations afforded a greater sense
of efficacy.
The malleability of the self over the world is also an issue for achieve-
ment motivation. The relatively inviolate selves of North Americans
suggests they should subscribe more than East Asians to entity theories
of self (Heine et al., in press; cf. Dweck & Leggett, 1988). With an entity
view of self, achievement is assumed to be anchored in rather innate and
fixed abilities and is believed to be resistant to change. With such a view,
encounters with failure signal permanent inadequacies of the self and
should be particularly distressing, leading to self-protective strategies or
attempts to avoid future situations where one might fail again. Clearly,
the converse lay theory, an incremental theory of self, where achievement
is viewed as hinging on efforts, is by no means rare or discouraged in
North America. American culture also lauds the importance of effort and
reveres cultural icons of hard work such as Horatio Alger. Indeed, it
would appear to be dysfunctional within any culture to eschew the belief
that hard work will be rewarded.
However, the fluid selves of East Asians suggests that they should more
strongly endorse incremental theories of self than North Americans
(Heine et al., in press). Cross-cultural comparisons of incremental
theories contrasting means on subjective Likert scales (a methodology
that is problematic due to reference-group effects; Heine, Lehman,
Peng, & Greenholtz, 2001; Peng, Nisbett, & Wong, 1997) yield mixed
evidence for cultural differences (Chiu et al., 1997; Norenzayan, Choi,
& Nisbett, 2000); however, methodologies that do not involve compari-
sons of Likert scale responses yield pronounced cultural differences
(Heine et al., in press). That Confucianism emphasizes the importance
of fulfilling obligations associated with one’s roles suggests that indi-
Self as Cultural Product 893

viduals must have the potential to master the requisite skills of those roles.
The roles determine the standards of performance, and it is incumbent
upon individuals to adjust themselves accordingly. Cultural tasks of
fitting in and achieving interdependence lead to a belief in the improv-
ability of the self in cultures which emphasize hierarchy and mastery of
one’s roles. When one has obligations to live up to consensual standards
associated with one’s role, failure indicates that one is not doing enough.
Failures serve to signify insufficient effort and highlight where individu-
als need to work harder. Hence, rather than distancing oneself from an
achievement situation when one fails, East Asians should meet failure
with increased efforts (Heine et al., in press).
A series of cross-cultural experiments support this hypothesis (Heine
et al., in press). North American participants were found to persist longer
on a task after initially succeeding on it, whereas Japanese persisted
longer after they had failed. Moreover, these cultural differences in
persistence after failure appeared to importantly hinge on the lay theories
regarding the role of effort in success. These results support the notion
that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to view abilities
as malleable.
In the context of a culturally sustained incremental theory of self, hard
work and diligence come to take on greater moral significance. This is
evident in the remarkably positive connotations that the word “effort”
entails in East Asia. For example, surveys in Japan of “what is your
favorite word?” have revealed that the most popular favorite in Japan is
effort, doryoku, closely followed by perseverence, gambaru (Shapiro &
Hiatt, 1989). In many ways, East Asian societies are structured such that
effort will be met with greater rewards. The civil service exams of China,
which extend back for centuries and have greatly influenced the structure
of modern-day university entrance exams throughout East Asia, reflect
this attitude. Unlike SATs and GREs, which were originally designed as
aptitude tests to provide a view into the individual’s abilities that grades
missed, entrance exams in East Asia make no pretense of being about
abilities. Successful performance on these exams requires the mastery of
countless facts, innumerable hours of study, and years spent at the
country’s ubiquitous cram schools (Rohlen, 1983). Admittance to a good
school in Japan requires a significant amount of effort.
Cross-cultural studies of attributions for performance similarly cor-
roborate these differences. North Americans tend to view their successful
performances as due to their own inner abilities (although they will
894 Heine

acknowledge effort more for their failures; for a review see Zuckerman,
1979). In contrast, Japanese rarely make ability attributions, and instead
tend to see successes as due to their hard work and failures as due to
insufficient efforts (e.g., Kashima & Triandis, 1986). East Asian mothers
(Stevenson & Stigler, 1992) and teachers (Tobin et al., 1989) are less
likely than their North American counterparts to view differences
among children as being due to their natural abilities, and schools do
not tend to track students or promote them on the basis of merit (Lewis,
1995). When asked directly, Americans estimate that 36% of intelligence
is due to effort, whereas Japanese estimate that effort accounts for about
55% of intelligence (Heine et al., in press). East Asian and North
American cultures differ importantly in their beliefs in the malleability
of achievement.

Relation of Self to Others

The East Asian interdependent self, as discussed above, is importantly
defined and sustained with respect to significant relationships within the
ingroup. Relationships do not just serve to allow the East Asian self to
pursue individual desires; rather, they determine the individual’s roles
which influence how the individual comes to behave and identify him or
herself. In this way, East Asian selves’ important relationships are self-
defining, and might best be viewed as ends in and of themselves. In
contrast, as the North American individualistic self is viewed as complete
in itself, relationships play a lesser role in self-identity. Relationships
with others are important for the North American self, to be sure, but their
importance derives largely from what they provide for the individual.
Relationships allow the individual to secure resources which serve both
physical needs (e.g., money, food, protection) and psychological needs
(e.g., love, belongingness, favorable social comparisons, verification of
oneself), which are necessary for the individual self to function. In this
regard, relationships serve as means for attaining individual selves’ goals
rather than as ends by themselves (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).
The notion that relationships are so integral to the East Asian self
suggests that an individual’s self-defining relationships represent a
unique class of relationships within the universe of potential relationships
that the individual might have. To put it succinctly, the interdependent
self cannot be interdependent with everyone. Gaining admission into the
sacrosanct ingroup is a substantial accomplishment, and these relation-
Self as Cultural Product 895

ships should hold a privileged position for East Asian selves. That
relationship harmony is maintained when individuals fulfill obligations
to others with respect to their roles dictates that one needs to distinguish
between those to whom they have obligations and those to whom they
do not. To the extent that a goal of selfhood is to confirm one’s existence
by distinguishing what is and what is not self suggests that interdependent
East Asian selves will contrast their ingroups against the surrounding
environment. This would suggest that the boundary distinguishing in-
groups from outgroups would be particularly salient for East Asian
selves.
In contrast, for those with a more autonomous self, the self-nonself
boundary is located distinctly between the individual and the other: any
other. That North American selves tend to perceive themselves as existing
and functioning separately from the social environment suggests that the
composition of the individuals in that environment are relatively tangen-
tial to one’s identity (although individuals certainly have different kinds
of relationships with others). The boundary distinguishing ingroups from
outgroups is relatively inconsequential to self-construction, and it should
hence be experienced as rather fluid and permeable.
Evidence of the heightened distinction between ingroups and out-
groups among East Asians is available from a variety of sources. First,
ethnographic research on Japanese richly describes this pronounced
difference in behavior between contexts involving ingroups (uchi) versus
outgroups (soto; e.g., Bachnik, 1992). Language, customs, and obliga-
tions vary considerably depending on whether the other is an ingroup or
outgroup member. Empirical evidence from several different paradigms
corroborates this cultural difference in the placement of the boundary
between self and non-self. Iyengar, Lepper, and Ross (1999) report the
results of a number of studies contrasting ingroups and outgroups
between East Asians and North Americans. They found that Euro-
Americans did not seem to distinguish between friends, strangers, or
enemies in their application of trait descriptors or tendencies to make
dispositional attributions. In contrast, for East Asian participants, there
was little difference in their willingness to assign traits to themselves or
to their friends. However, a pronounced difference emerged in their
willingness to distinguish between either strangers or their enemies
and their friends. Iyengar et al. (1999) also found that whereas Euro-
Americans reacted negatively when choices were made for them by
someone else, regardless of whether the choicemaker was their mother
896 Heine

or a stranger, Asian-American children only reacted negatively when the

choicemaker was a stranger. When their mother had made the choice for
them, they were just as willing to work on the task as when they had
chosen it for themselves. Yamagishi and colleagues (e.g., Yamagishi,
1988; Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994) have developed a model to explain
trust and commitment among individuals in East Asia and North Amer-
ica. They maintain that in a society characterized by strong group ties,
feelings of trust are confined to that group. The stronger bonds are among
members within a group, the weaker are the ties between groups. One
cannot have strong loyalties that conflict with each other. Hence, in
collectivist societies such as Japan, where commitment to ingroup mem-
bers is strong, there should be less of a willingness to cooperate with
outgroup members. Their research finds that Americans have higher
levels of general trust towards strangers than do Japanese (Yamagishi &
Yamagishi, 1994). Furthermore, although Japanese ingroup relationships
tend to be close-knit and enduring, in studies conducted with strangers,
Japanese are actually more likely than Americans to exit a group when
their behavior is not actively being monitored (Yamagishi, 1988). This
research demonstrates that typical research paradigms of social interac-
tion conducted with strangers in East Asian cultures highlight the lack of
relations between individuals.
An extensive review of studies using Asch’s (1956) conformity para-
digm reveals that East Asians’ conformity appears to be more contingent
on the nature of the majority group than it is for North Americans
(Bond & Smith, 1996). When in a situation with strangers, Japanese
conform to a comparable degree as Americans, or even show some
evidence of anti-conformity (e.g., Frager, 1970). However, when in a
situation with their peers, Japanese show evidence of heightened con-
formity (Williams & Sogon, 1984); indeed, this study found the second
largest degree of conformity out of the 133 studies reviewed across
17 different countries (Bond & Smith, 1996). In contrast, the degree of
conformity for Americans did not appear to be contingent on the rela-
tionships between the subjects and those of the majority group.
In general, across a wide variety of paradigms, there is converging
evidence that East Asians view ingroup members as an extension of their
selves while maintaining distance from outgroup members. North Ameri-
cans show a tendency to view themselves as distinct from all other selves,
regardless of their relationships to the individual. This research highlights
the necessity of specifying the nature of the other in group interaction
Self as Cultural Product 897

studies with East Asian participants. Standard lab paradigms that bring
together strangers will not reveal the self-defining interdependent con-
nection between East Asians and may in fact reveal less connection
between selves and strangers than what is typically observed with North
American samples.

Self-Enhancing Versus Self-Critical Motivations

The cultural roots of the self extend deep and shape the goals to which
individuals aspire. The North American self can be characterized as
possessing a clear goal of viewing oneself positively (e.g., Rogers, 1951;
Taylor & Brown, 1988). As discussed above, the identity of the North
American self is anchored in its relatively fixed internal attributes and is
viewed as the source of action and the center of control. Maintenance of
this autonomous sense of agency and identity is fostered by identifying
and affirming these inner attributes (Mesquita & Karasawa, in press). A
habitually positive self-view confirms for the individual that they possess
the requisite characteristics to fulfill the cultural tasks of being a self-
sufficient and autonomous being (Heine et al., 1999).
There is much empirical evidence to support the notion that North
Americans are motivated to view themselves in positive terms. The vast
majority of North Americans view themselves in highly positive terms,
scoring well above the theoretical midpoint of self-esteem scales
(Baumeister, Tice, & Hutton, 1989). A common self-view among North
Americans is thus one that is unambiguously positive. When evaluating
themselves, North Americans do not adopt an objective or unbiased view
but rather give themselves the benefit of the doubt, being highly selective
in the information that they attend to and remember (Crary, 1966),
framing the information in more ambiguous (and hence easily exagger-
ated) terms (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989), taking credit for
their successes and explaining away their failures (Zuckerman, 1979),
and, in general, rounding upwards whenever they get the chance (Tay-
lor & Brown, 1988). These positive illusions are evident across different
kinds of enhancement biases: for example, self-evaluations (Paulhus,
1998), feelings of control (Langer, 1975), and views of the future
(Weinstein, 1980); different boundaries of self: for example, the individ-
ual self (Campbell, 1986), the group self (Heine & Lehman, 1997a), and
the individual’s relationships (Endo, Heine, & Lehman, 2000); and
across different content domains, including traits (Dunning et al., 1989),
898 Heine

attributions (Zuckerman, 1979), and attitudes (Campbell, 1986). Indeed,

a succinct summary of the self-enhancement literature would be that,
unless North Americans encounter inescapably hard evidence to the
contrary (e.g., Kunda, 1990), they will tend to favor self-relevant infor-
mation that casts them in the most positive light.
This goal for North Americans to view themselves positively is per-
haps most evident in studies that manipulate the positivity of individuals’
self-views. When North Americans encounter negative information that
challenges their ability to be the autonomous self-sufficient agents that
their culture encourages them to be, they frequently engage in some kind
of maneuver designed to disarm the threat. They might rationalize their
decisions (Steele, Spencer, & Lynch, 1993), engage in self-destructive
behaviors that provide them with a readily available excuse for their poor
achievement (Berglas & Jones, 1978), sabotage the performance of a
close friend (Tesser & Smith, 1980), search for a downward social
comparison target (Wood, 1989), or discount the feedback that they have
received (Heine, Takata, & Lehman, 2000). The extent of these self-
evaluation maintenance tactics clearly highlights the importance of being
able to maintain a positive self-view among North Americans.
In contrast, the Confucian framework underlying the East Asian self
brings with it cultural goals that conflict with desires to be self-sufficient
and autonomous. Individuals are connected to each other via relation-
ships and with respect to the roles that are inherent in those relationships.
These various relationships constitute a coherent hierarchy within which
the individual has a place associated with a clear set of obligations and
duties towards others in the group. Inadequate performance of the duties
associated with one’s roles indicates that one is not doing his or her part
in contributing to the group’s success and is thus not fulfilling important
cultural obligations associated with interdependence. Individuals’ com-
mitment to others in their groups renders them obligated to live up to
the standards associated with their roles—standards that are, impor-
tantly, not determined by the individuals themselves but consensually
by others in the hierarchy, and, to a certain extent, by society as a whole
(Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997). Individuals
thus must be sensitive to ways that they might fall short of these
standards, thereby failing to live up to the obligations that they have, and
communicating to others that they are not doing their part towards the
group’s success. They must become vigilant to any shortcomings indi-
cating where they need to make more effort to better fulfill their roles.
Self as Cultural Product 899

This orientation, in stark contrast to self-enhancement, is termed self-

criticism.
There is much evidence of self-criticism among East Asians; for
example, East Asians tend to evaluate themselves less positively than
North Americans (e.g., Kanagawa et al., in press), show little evidence
of self-enhancing biases (e.g., Yik, Bond, & Paulhus, 1998), and tend not
to show self-evaluation maintenance tendencies (e.g., Cross, Liao, &
Josephs, 1992; Heine & Lehman, 1997b). Evidence suggests that East
Asians are more willing to accept information indicating their failures
(Heine et al., 2000), are more likely to recall events regarding negative
information (Meijer, Heine, & Yamagami, 1999), and their self-evaluations
are more affected by failures than successes (Kitayama et al., 1997). These
cultural differences are clear across a wide array of paradigms, including
those conducted with hidden or behavioral measures, and cannot be inter-
preted as solely due to differences in self-presentation (see Heine et al., 1999
for a review).
Given the concerns of the East Asian self as reviewed in this paper, it
would seem that motivations regarding self-evaluations would appear in
different forms. The emphasis on fulfilling role obligations and having
an extraindividual focus suggests that, rather than self-esteem (individual
views self positively), East Asians would have a greater concern for
esteem from others (others view self positively), loosely captured by the
term “face.” There is much discussion on the importance of maintaining
face in East Asian psychological and ethnographic literatures (e.g.,
Chang & Holt, 1994). Face can be understood as the amount of public
worth that one has associated with one’s roles. When one acts in a way
unbefitting one’s roles, such as when a high school senior member of the
tennis team is beaten by a freshman, a mother sends her child to school
with an inadequately prepared lunchbox, or a student corrects a profes-
sor’s error in front of the class, one loses face.
The Confucian emphasis on fulfilling role obligations suggests that
losing face is potentially more threatening for East Asians. Although
experiences associated with losing face are not unknown to Americans
(just as experiences of losing self-esteem are not unknown to East
Asians), East Asians may have a richer understanding of the concept and
are more strongly motivated to protect their face. Indeed, the Oxford
English Dictionary finds the term “losing face” first entering the English
language as a direct translation from Chinese in the late 19th century.
Although face is richly described in East Asian ethnographic literatures,
900 Heine

little empirical work has been conducted; at present, therefore, we know

little of how these concerns affect individual’s thoughts and behaviors.
It may be the case that maintaining face for East Asians provides similar
psychological benefits as maintaining self-esteem does for North
Americans.

CONCLUSION
The present review highlights how many psychological theories of self
do not export well across cultural borders. Some key lay theories of the
self embraced by North Americans appear to exist in modified forms
among East Asians. East Asians, in contrast to North Americans, are more
likely to view selves as changing across different situations; to search for
information outside of the individual to explain behavior; to view selves,
but not the social world, as malleable; to incorporate ingroup members
into the self and elaborate the distance of outgroup members; and to view
self-criticism as an important way to motivate the individual to do his or
her best. These differences are not trivial or tangential to an under-
standing of the self. Indeed, many of the key principles in personality and
social psychology hinge on these factors: culturally derived factors.
Cultural psychology maintains that self and culture make each other
up, and the past decade has provided a wealth of empirical support of
this. Coming to understand the nature of the East Asian self requires a
rich understanding of the culture that sustains it. A culturally informed
psychology will explore the relations between cultural level factors and
psychological processes. This remains a distant goal, but the past decade
has provided us with a significant few steps in this direction.

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