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Positive Self-Views:
Understanding Universals and Variability Across Cultures

Steven J. Heine
University of British Columbia

(In press) Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology

	Evolutionary psychology has been largely concerned with explicating how various mental modules have emerged as adaptations to problems that were regularly encountered in the ancestral environment.  Much compelling research has identified how we can understand a variety of psychological tendencies, such as mating strategies (e.g., Buss, 1989), altruism (e.g., Hamilton, 1972), and cheater detection (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992), in terms of how these were selected for in the past.  However, the existence of cultural variation in psychological processes renders the task of identifying the selected mechanisms underlying them to be highly challenging.  When psychological processes emerge to look highly similar across cultures explanations in terms of adaptations are readily evident and compelling.  For example, that in cultures around the world people prefer sweet and fatty foods (Rozin, 1976), express their happiness by smiling (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969), and are populated by males who are more violent than their females (Daly & Wilson, 1988), presents researchers with an excellent opportunity to posit the selective pressures that existed in the ancestral environment and to develop novel, and sometimes counterintuitive, hypotheses which can be tested in the laboratory (e.g., Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998).  However, when a psychological process emerges in dramatically different forms across cultures the task of identifying the adaptation is not at all straightforward.  I consider the challenge of considering cultural variability in evolutionary theories by exploring a psychological phenomenon that shows a great deal of cultural variation: the self-enhancement motive.
Self-Esteem and Self-Enhancing Motivations
	Self-enhancement is a motivation that has captured the interests of many psychologists. Defined as a tendency to dwell on and elaborate positive information about the self over negative self-relevant information, self-enhancement has been central to a wide variety of research programs, including prejudice (e.g., Noel, Wann, & Branscombe, 1995), aggression (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996), relationships (e.g., Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996), and cognitive dissonance (Steele, Spencer, & Lynch, 1993), to name a few.  The great deal of interest in this topic is evident in the enormous amount of research that has been conducted on self-esteem and self-enhancement over the past few decades.  Indeed, there are few topics in social psychology that have received more attention.  However, despite the great deal of interest in the self-enhancement motive, the field is no where close to a consensus regarding how this motivation originated, or what function it serves (e.g., Barkow, 1989; Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, in press).
	One likely reason behind the popularity of the self-enhancement motive in psychological research is the sheer magnitude of this motivation, at least within North American populations.  The evidence for its magnitude comes from a variety of different sources.  First, there is a great prevalence of people with positive self-views.  Baumeister, Tice, and Hutton (1989) noted that, without a single exception, the means of distributions of self-esteem scores fell above the theoretical midpoint of the scale.  Heine and Lehman (2003) noted that in their omnibus sample that 93% of European-Canadians could be classified as having high self-esteem.  Positive self-views are common indeed.  
	It does not seem that people are reaching these positive self-evaluations through an objective detached consideration of the evidence; rather, there is much evidence that people (again, at least North Americans) have an exaggeratedly positive view of themselves.  People view themselves in unrealistically positive terms when they evaluate themselves, consider their future, make attributions for their performances, attempt to control their worlds, or remember their pasts (for reviews see Greenwald, 1980; Taylor & Brown, 1988).  Moreover, they have similarly positively biased views of the groups to which they belong, viewing their friends, families, schools, countries, and social groups in unrealistically positive terms as well (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Schmidt, 1988; Heine & Lehman, 1997).  
	Although there is evidence for cognitive biases underlying some of these tendencies for positive self-views; e.g., Klar & Giladi, 1997; Miller & Ross, 1975), we tend to speak of such positive distortions in people’s self-evaluations as reflecting a motivational bias because of the findings from a number of different research paradigms that have investigated how people respond when they are deprived of a positive self-view.  When North Americans encounter failure, for example, they are likely to seek out a downward social comparison target to create a favorable contrast (e.g., Wills, 1981), or they might boost their evaluation in other unrelated domains to compensate for the failure (Baumeister & Jones, 1978), or they might try to align themselves with positive others in order to bask in their reflected glory (Cialdini et al., 1976).  Much research has underscored a hydraulic model for how people compensate for negative self-evaluations by boosting their self-esteem through some other means (Tesser, Crepaz, Beach, Cornell, & Collins, 2000).  These research paradigms reveal that people can be motivated to secure a positive self-view.  
	In sum, there is a great deal of evidence for strong self-enhancement motivations.  A meta-analysis of the magnitude of self-enhancing motivations among North Americans revealed an effect of d = .89, an extremely strong tendency (Heine & Hamamura, 2004).  Moreover, there is evidence that this self-enhancement bias has been getting stronger in recent decades (Twenge & Campbell, 2001).  Self-enhancing motivations can be pronounced indeed.
Questioning the Origins of the Self-Enhancement Motive
	The pervasiveness and magnitude of self-enhancement motivations have led some researchers to propose an evolutionary account of this motive.  That is, people have come to favor positive information regarding themselves over negative information because these tendencies have been selected in the ancestral environment.  A variety of different accounts have been proposed for how the self-enhancement motive emerged as an adaptation.  For example, Barkow (1989) proposed that self-esteem was selected to serve as a gauge of subtle changes of the individual’s status within dominance hierarchies.  Leary and colleagues (Leary et al., 1995) propose that self-esteem is an adaptation that functions as an indicator to detect when our social relationships with others were vulnerable.  Terror management theory (Pyszczynski et al., in press) proposes that self-esteem emerged as an adaptation that serves to stave off the debilitating existential anxieties that come from our fears of our own mortality.  These divergent theories share a common theme: a motivation as powerful and pervasive as self-enhancement must serve to increase our fitness, especially given the potential costs that individuals must sometimes bear for holding these motivations (e.g., Baumeister et al., 1996, Paulhus, 1998).  
	However, before constructing a theory about how self-enhancement emerged as an adaptive element of human nature it is important to be confident that our theories are based on a representative sample of human nature.  This point is not typically underscored by evolutionary biologists as issues of sampling are rarely relevant for studying other animal species.  For the most part, one blue-footed booby is as good as any other for documenting the nature of blue-footed boobies.  However, a critical issue that concerns many of the social sciences is that human nature differs from that of other species in that humans are so dependent on culture (Geertz, 1973).  Although there might be some precursors to cultural learning in some other species, no other species is as fully enculturated as humans (Tomasello, 1999).  Human fitness importantly depends on individual’s abilities to learn cultural information and to help teach it to their offspring.  Humans do not interact with their physical environments directly, rather they interact with environments that are, in part, cultural constructions.  Within these cultural environments key needs such as safety, procuring food, attracting mates, fending off rivals, are pursued by engaging in learned behaviors, applying acquired technologies, and following culturally-determined protocols and etiquettes.  Human actions, like the actions of all species, have biological significance; however, human actions are draped in particular cultural meanings.
	That humans are a cultural species does not mean that there are not human universals, or that we cannot speak of a biological underpinning of our cultural behaviors.  However, to say that humans are cultural beings does mean that we have to be careful about identifying the level of analysis by which we consider human universals.  One level of analysis targets the phenomenon as it manifests itself in human behavior.  To the extent that this is a behavior that varies importantly across cultures its manifestation is what anthropologists refer to as an emic phenomenon (Pike, 1967).  A second level of analysis targets the phenomenon at a level which is common to all cultures.  This is termed an etic phenomenon.  Some etic phenomena are incapable of being observed directly because they are instantiated in dramatically different forms in different cultures.  For example, marriage is an etic phenomenon, as in all cultures there is some form of institutionalized arrangement for men and women to form a long-term mating relationship that facilitates the caring of offspring (Brown, 1991).  However, the various kinds of marriages that we see around the world (e.g., arranged monogamy, voluntary serial monogamy, polygyny, fraternal polyandry), are emic phenomena.  The claim that marriage is etic can only be made by abstracting from the commonalities across the diverse array of emic instantiations of marriage.  The challenge for deriving evolutionary theories is that it is not immediately clear whether a particular phenomenon, such as fraternal polyandrous marriage, is etic or emic.  We can only be confident that we have correctly identified the etic level when we have considered a diverse enough sampling of the world’s cultures.  
	A compelling theory, then, about the evolutionary origins of the self-enhancement motive cannot rely solely on evidence that is gathered in a single cultural context, such as that of Western industrialized societies.  If a theory is proposing that self-enhancement has evolved to solve some kind of problem in the ancestral environment, such as status, or belongingness, or quelling existential anxieties, then we should see evidence for this motivation in all cultures, or at least in all cultures where concerns with status, belongingness, and existential despair are as evident as they are in the West.  To the extent that the self-enhancement motive is much weaker, or largely absent, in other non-Western cultural contexts would require that these theories be significantly qualified, if not rejected.  Thus far, however, theories about the origins of self-enhancement have concerned themselves almost exclusively with data from Western cultures. 
Self-Enhancement in East Asia
	Over the past decade there has been a great deal of research on self-enhancing motivations in East Asian cultural contexts.  In contrast to the research conducted in Western cultural contexts, however, East Asian research has not revealed clear evidence for the self-enhancement motive.  For example, whereas much research has found in many contexts that Westerners seek downward social comparison partners in an attempt to create a favorable contrast and boost a positive self-evaluation (e.g., Wills, 1981), people of East Asian descent prefer to seek out upward comparisons, and especially after failure (White & Lehman, in press).  Whereas Americans tend to evaluate themselves more positively than they are viewed by others, Japanese rate themselves less positively than others view them (Heine & Renshaw, 2002).  Whereas Canadians are more easily convinced that they have done well on a task than they have done poorly, Japanese have an easier time believing that they’re poor on a task than that they’ve done well on it (Heine, Takata, & Lehman, 2000).  This pattern of a relative lack of self-enhancement among East Asians is not due to a selective review of the literature.  A recent meta-analysis found that every published cross-cultural study of self-enhancing biases between East Asians in East Asia and Westerners in the West found significantly greater biases among the Westerners (Heine & Hamamura, 2004).  The average effect size across these 45 studies was large (d = .82), and, moreover, across all of these studies East Asians were not showing significant self-enhancement average (d = .01).  In sum, there is scant evidence for self-enhancing motivations among East Asians.  
	It is possible that the observed cultural differences in self-enhancement are not due to differences in motivations, however, but that various experimental artifacts have prevented us from detecting strong East Asian self-enhancing motivations.  For example, some alternative explanations that have been raised in the literature include the ideas that East Asians self-enhance in collectivistic domains (e.g., Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003), East Asians self-enhance by viewing their groups in unrealistically positive terms (e.g., Muramoto & Yamaguchi, 1997), or that East Asians are concealing their true self-enhancing motivations by feigning modesty (e.g., Kurman, 2003).  However, these alternative explanations are weakened in that the bulk of the experimental evidence that has tested these hypotheses is in direct contradiction with each of them (for reviews see Heine et al., 1999; Heine, 2003; Heine, in press).  Self-enhancing motivations appear to be far weaker, if not largely absent, among East Asians.
Face Maintenance Motivations.
	That East Asians have little motivation to view themselves positively does not mean that they do not have other important self-relevant motivations that can inform investigations into the origins of self-enhancement motivations.  Much has been written about a motivation for “face” that appears to be especially prominent in East Asian contexts (e.g., Ting-Toomey, 1994).  Face has been defined as “the respectability and/or deference which a person can claim for himself from others by virtue of the relative position he occupies in his social network and the degree to which he is judged to have functioned adequately in that position” (p. 883, Ho, 1976).  Face shares some features with self-enhancement, in that both are concerned with positive evaluations about an individual.  However, there are important differences in psychological processes that are associated with the two.  Below I consider a number of psychological processes that vary depending on whether one is trying to self-enhance and maintain self-esteem or whether one is trying to self-improve and maintain face.
Promotion vs. Prevention Focus.  First, as evident in Ho’s definition, face is received when one functions at an adequate level for their role.  Although face is lost when one performs at a level that fails to meet the minimum standards, performing at a level that surpasses the minimum standards is not met with a calibrated increase in face.  As a Cantonese expression puts it, “Face is for others to give and yourself to lose.”  This inherent asymmetry in the concept of face suggests that face is a currency that requires individuals to be more vigilant to opportunities for loss than to opportunities for gain.   
	In contrast, because self-enhancement is associated with identifying positive features about the self, and downplaying potentially negative features, there is an asymmetry in the opposite direction of that of face.  Self-enhancing individuals tend to dwell on, elaborate, and exaggerate positive information about their selves, whereas negative information tends to be downplayed, rationalized, or forgotten (see Taylor & Brown, 1988 for a review).  Self-esteem is thus a currency that is more easily gained than lost.
	People respond differently when they are considering resources that vary in their ease in accumulation or loss.  When focusing on how one can attain positive outcomes, people are more likely to adopt a promotion focus, in which they dwell on concerns of advancement, accomplishments, and aspirations (Higgins, 1996).  In contrast, when individuals are concerned with how they can avoid negative outcomes people adopt a prevention focus, and elaborate upon issues regarding their safety and security.  Because of the asymmetries inherent in face-maintenance and self-enhancement, we would expect that there would be corresponding cultural differences in regulatory focus: that is, East Asians should be relatively more prevention focused and North Americans should be more promotion focused.  A few recent studies have been conducted that provide evidence in support of this.  For example, Lee, Aaker, and Gardner (2000) found that East Asians viewed tennis games that were framed as opportunities to avoid a loss as more important than North Americans, whereas North Americans viewed the same games when framed as opportunities to secure a win as more important than East Asians.  Elliot, Chirkov, Kim and Sheldon (2001) contrasted personal goals among Koreans and Americans and found that avoidance personal goals were more commonly identified among the Koreans than they were among the American sample.  Moreover, whereas the presence of avoidance personal goals is associated with lower subjective well-being among Americans these relations did not hold for Koreans (also see Ip & Chiu, 2002).  Heine et al. (2001) demonstrated that whereas North Americans persist longer after successes than failures, Japanese show greater efforts after success than after failure (also see Hoshino-Browne & Spencer, 2000; Oishi & Diener, 2003).  Regulatory focus varies importantly across cultures.
Internal vs. External Frame of Reference.  Perhaps the most straightforward, and important, way that self-esteem differs from face is with respect to who is doing the evaluating.  High self-esteem can only be achieved if individuals view themselves positively.  To be sure, people’s own evaluations of themselves are importantly influenced by what they think others are thinking of them.  Self-evaluations reflect perceptions of how others are viewing one (Leary et al., 1995).  However, achieving high self-esteem requires that the individual internalize their thoughts on the standards by which others are evaluating them.  When individuals feel that they are meeting these internalized standards of success, they will feel good about themselves and their self-esteem will increase.  In contrast, face is secured when others view the individual positively.  To secure face, people need to be concerned about how others are viewing them, and as such, must consider how they are measuring up to others’ standards.  Feeling that one is doing well does not boost one’s face; face is only maintained when others are willing to grant it.  Hence, if an individual is primarily concerned with his or her face he or she will be more concerned with the perspective of an audience.  These different frames of reference are important components of self-esteem and face, and they require distinct strategies to secure them. 
	Self-esteem maintenance thus involves a rather straightforward goal.  Individuals need to convince themselves that they are good, and these efforts are fostered by self-deception.  However, a critical feature of self-deception is that the self is very cooperative when being misled to think of itself in overly positive terms.  Others, in contrast, are not so easily deceived.  An audience does not share the same motivation to form a positive evaluation of the individual, and as such, audiences tend to evaluate performers in rather objective terms at best, and are likely in many situations to derogate the performer to satisfy their own self-deceptive desires to find downward social comparison targets (Wills, 1981).  
	Individuals are in a very vulnerable position when the key source of evaluation moves from the amenable, easily deceived self, to the potentially critical perspective of an audience.  It would seem that when individuals are concerned about face maintenance and living up to the standards of an audience, the best strategy would be to adopt a perspective that is at least as critical as that of the audience.  By identifying behavior that might potentially fall short of others’ standards, and by working towards correcting and eliminating these vulnerabilities, the individual is best able to protect their face.
The differential emphasis placed on face and self-esteem in different cultures predicts comparable cultural differences in frames of reference.  Indeed, recent evidence indicates that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to maintain an external frame of reference.  For example, Cohen and Gunz (2002) found that Asian-Canadians are more likely to experience third-person than first-person memories for situations in which they were the center of attention.  That is, their recall of their past experiences includes much imagery of how they appeared at the time to others – imagery which was never accessible to them directly.  Their heightened sensitivity of an audience leaks into their memories of themselves.  In contrast, Euro-Canadians’ memories for themselves at the center of attention showed significantly less of this third-person imagery.  Their memories of experiences when they were at the center of attention had more imagery that was consistent with how they originally saw the event.    
	Cross-cultural research on self-awareness also identifies cultural divergences in frames of reference.  When individuals are aware of how they appear to others they are said to be in the state of objective self-awareness (Duvall & Wicklund, 1972).  That is, they are aware of how they appear as an object, a “me,” in contrast, to the experience of being a subject, an “I.”  It would seem that to the extent that East Asians are aware of an audience, and are adjusting their behaviors to that audience, they should more likely be in a habitual state of objective self-awareness than North Americans.  If this is the case then stimuli that enhance objective self-awareness (for example, seeing oneself in front of a mirror) should have little effect on East Asians.  Even without a mirror present East Asians should be considering themselves in terms of how they appear to others.  A pair of recent cross-cultural studies corroborate this hypothesis: Heine, Takemoto, Sonoda, and Moskalenko (2003) found that whereas Canadians and Americans showed a decrease in self-esteem and an increase in self-discrepancies when they saw their reflection in a mirror (replicating much past research on self-awareness; e.g., Duval & Wicklund, 1972), Japanese self-evaluations were unaffected by the presence of the mirror.  Moreover, although North American self-evaluations were much more positive than Japanese when the mirror was not present, they were at relatively similar levels to Japanese when they were in front of the mirror.  One reason that self-evaluations tend to be so much more positive for North Americans than Japanese may be that North Americans are less likely to be considering how they appear to others.  Objectivity constrains the ability to maintain a positive self-view.
Independent vs. Interdependent Views of Self.  A final process implicated by concerns with maintaining self-esteem and face is with regard to how people view themselves.  One way of considering the self is to see it as a relatively autonomous, self-sustaining, collection of attributes, that is largely independent from others.  This independent view of self has been the working model for many of the theories of self that have been developed by a Western-dominated social psychology.  In contrast, a second way of construing selves is to see them as being fundamentally interconnected, situationally-variable, and grounded in roles and relationships with significant ingroup others.  This interdependent view of self has recently become a focus for research, particularly in non-Western cultures, and has been linked to a wide array of distinct phenomena (for reviews see Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989).
	One way that independence would seem to be linked with self-esteem is that to the extent that the feelings of identity of an individual with an independent view of self are based on herself and herself alone, it would seem especially important for that individual to come to view herself positively.  It would be difficult to feel as though she is autonomous and self-sufficient if she did not view herself as competent and talented.  It would seem that being able to feel as though one does not have to rely on others and is able to take care of oneself requires that one embraces a relatively positive self-view.  In contrast, feelings of identity for individuals with interdependent views of self importantly hinge on their relations with others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).  Elaborating on what is positive about oneself will not serve to increase one’s belongingness with others (and indeed, might have the opposite effect; see Paulhus, 1998).  Rather, belongingness will be enhanced when significant others are viewing you as desirable, and as contributing satisfactorily towards the ingroups’ goals.  As such, maintaining one’s face should be associated with the maintenance of belongingness. 
	This reasoning suggests that values related to the independent self theoretically should be intimately related with self-enhancement, whereas those related to the interdependent self should be largely unrelated, or even negatively related, to self-enhancement.  A variety of studies have measured the correlations between trait independence and interdependence and self-esteem or self-enhancement.  These studies have consistently found clear positive relations between independence and positive self-views, regardless of culture, and negative (albeit weaker) relations between interdependence and positive self-views (Heine et al., 1999; Heine & Renshaw, 2002; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002; Singelis, Bond, Lai, & Sharkey, 1999).  Self-enhancement is related to independence and is opposed to interdependence.  
Origins of Motives and Levels of Analyses
	The existence of pronounced cultural variation of the self-enhancement motive makes it problematic to explain origins for that motive in terms of the benefits positive self-views would have served in the ancestral environment.  East Asians and Westerners share the same ancestors, at least up to about 30,000 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza & Cavalli-Sforza, 1995), so we would expect that the same adaptations would be present in both cultural groups.  It is theoretically possible that self-enhancement had more adaptive benefits in Western cultural environments and that these motivations were selected for in the 30,000 years since East Asians and Westerners have been separated.  However, because East Asians who have acculturated to Western culture appear to share the same motivations as Westerners, this last account loses much plausibility (Heine & Lehman, 2003).  Rather, we are left with the challenging findings that Westerners are especially concerned with self-esteem, and engage in a variety of psychological processes that facilitate positive self-views, whereas East Asians are more concerned with face-maintenance, and engage in the thought processes that facilitate a positive reputation, which often requires elaborating on negative information about the selves.  How can we consider evolutionary origins for such culturally divergent processes?
	Cultural variation brings the question of whether we have considered the appropriate level of analysis to the forefront.  For example, that East Asians do not show tendencies to favor positive information about the self over negative information, means that self-enhancement that is operationalized in this way is not a universal motivation, and is not the appropriate level of analysis for understanding human motivations.  Theories that hinge on the selective value of seeking positive information about the self over negative information in the ancestral value are far less compelling when we observe that such tendencies are not evident among East Asians.  This cultural variation behooves us to consider a different level of analysis.
	Face maintenance and self-esteem enhancement are motivations that differ in terms of many of the psychological mechanisms that are implicated as reviewed above, however, they are similar in that face and self-esteem are both resources that are seen as important for becoming the kind of person valued in East Asian and North American cultural contexts, respectively.  In collectivistic cultures the way to secure status, and the accompanying fitness that is associated with it, is to maintain face.  In highly individualistic cultures the way to succeed is to live up to the cultural standards of self-contained individualism, autonomy, and self-sufficiency, and having high self-esteem facilitates this.  The goal is the same: to become a good person, but pursuing this goal entails identifying the standards and affordances by which our cultures define what a good person is (Heine et al., 1999; cf., Pyszczynski et al., in press).  I propose that the motivation to be a good person is the level at which we can speak of a universal motivation, and the challenge for psychologists is to consider the diverse ways which people go about pursuing this goal.

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