Move the Body, Change the Self:
Acculturative Effects on the Self-Concept

Steven J. Heine and Darrin R. Lehman
University of British Columbia

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Steven J. Heine
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 Move the Body, Change the Self:
Acculturative Effects on the Self-Concept
	The ever-growing body of research on acculturation is in agreement on at least one issue: moving to a new culture involves psychological adjustment.  This adjustment occurs over a wide variety of domains including acquiring a new language, learning new interpersonal and social behaviors, becoming accustomed to new values, adapting to a new diet, and becoming a member of a minority group (e.g., Berry & Kim, 1988; Church, 1982; Dornic, 1985; Feldman, Mont-Reynaud, & Rosenthal, 1992; Furnham & Bochner, 1986; LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993; Pasquali, 1985; Schwarzer, Bowler, & Rauch, 1985).  More pertinent to self-researchers, however, is research on the adjustment of the self-concept in the acculturation process.
Methodological Approaches for the Study of Culture and Psychology
	Cultural psychology maintains that culture and self are mutually constituted (e.g., Shweder, 1990; Markus, Mullally, & Kitayama, 1997).  That is, individuals seize meanings and resources from their culture in the construction of their selves, and likewise, the collective sharing of meaning and resources among individuals shapes the cultural environment.  Despite the straightforwardness of this theoretical view, empirical evidence for the cultural foundation of the self-concept is not immediately obvious, nor is its assessment a simple task.  For example, it is extraordinarily difficult for a cultural insider to observe the cultural foundation of the self-concept without another culture with which to make comparisons.  Culture is largely invisible to members of it, because what is unique to the culture cannot be distinguished from what people understand to be human nature (Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2001).  
There have been two primary methodological approaches to studying cultural influences on the self-concept.  A typical approach utilized by cultural psychologists is to explore a single culture outside of their own, thus providing researchers with a more objective vantage point.  The culture under study is contrasted with that of the researcher’s own either implicitly, by focusing on those cultural aspects that appear novel, or explicitly with cross-cultural data.  Any differences that are identified between the two cultures serve to illuminate the role of culture by inviting a cultural psychological explanation to account for them (Greenfield, 1997; Miller, 1999).  Because cultural psychologists are interested in the exploration of cultural artifacts in the self-concept, it is incumbent upon them to have a detailed knowledge of the culture under study.  This approach assumes that only through a rich understanding of the culture will a rich understanding of the self-concept be achieved.  Thus, a common strategy for cultural psychologists is to focus their research on a single culture, perhaps living there, learning the language, reading much about the culture, and collaborating with members of that culture (Greenfield, 1997).
However, the cultural psychological approach is not without its limitations.  Any differences that are identified between two cultures on a particular psychological process might tell us something about how one culture appears relative to the other, but it does not tell us much about that culture relative to the rest of the world.  Frequently it seems that much of cultural psychology is conducted from the perspective of North Americans (at least those north of the Mason-Dixon line).  Any cultural differences that are found in comparison to North Americans are typically interpreted as telling us something about how culture has shaped the “other” group.  However, the peculiar cultural phenomenon in need of explanation may instead be the North American case (e.g., Lipset, 1996).  That is, in many respects the more unusual finding, for example, is not that much of the world is collectivistic but that Westerners are individualistic (Geertz, 1974; Markus & Kitayama, 1991); not that Southerners participate in a “culture of honor” but that Northerners lack concern with honor (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996; Vandello & Cohen, this volume); not that Indians focus on beneficence obligations but that Americans focus on justice obligations (Miller & Bersoff, 1992); not that Japanese are self-critical but that Canadians and Americans are self-enhancing (Heine, Lehman, Kitayama, & Markus, 1999), or not that East Asians reason holistically but that Americans reason analytically (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, in press).  Binary comparisons render explanations relative to the comparison culture (usually North American), however if our goal is to investigate human nature, absolute assessments of cultural phenomena (or at least assessments relative to the world as a whole) would seem to be of greater utility.  
Likewise, if a psychological process under study is compared across cultures that are hypothesized to differ in terms of a dimension such as individualism/collectivism and a cultural difference is found, we cannot say with confidence whether individualism fosters the psychological process, or whether collectivism inhibits the process, or both.  Moreover, cultures are of course far too complex to be reduced meaningfully to any single dimension.  Any cultural differences that are identified may be due to other dimensions of culture on which the two groups differ that are concealed by a reliance on two-culture comparisons.  
Examining a multitude of cultures at once, the prototypical strategy of cross-cultural psychology (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1995; Hofstede, 1980; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1990) is an approach that mitigates some of these difficulties.  Large-scale multi-national comparisons allow us to see how each culture compares not just to a single cultural target, but to the larger matrix of other cultures in the study.  This approach strives to map out the world in terms of a number of cultural dimensions.  However, this method also has its shortcomings.  First, as no individual is particularly knowledgeable about all cultures under study, cross-cultural psychologists face the problem of having limited knowledge about their objects of study.  This approach does not allow one to explore how culture shapes the psychological process, as the researchers do not have access to information regarding the makeup of those cultures beyond their psychometric measures.  Moreover, as there are serious validity concerns with cross-cultural comparisons of many kinds of psychometric measures (e.g., Heine et al., in press; Heine et al., 2001; Peng, Nisbett, & Wong, 1997), accepting the data from large multinational comparisons at face value would seem to require a leap of faith.  Both of the conventional approaches to studying culture and psychology thus have their strengths and weaknesses.
A third possible approach for investigating the role of culture on the self is to examine the acculturating individual.  In many cases of migration, individuals’ culturally-constructed selves are at odds with the cultural meaning system of the new culture to which they have moved.  The study of acculturation makes it possible to identify changes in the self-concept that individuals experience when encountering a new culture.  Investigations of the acculturating individual allow researchers to assess the effects of a measured degree of exposure to a particular cultural environment on individuals’ self-concepts.  This approach has been rarely employed in the past (e.g., Cross, 1992; Minoura, 1992), but it can provide us with a perspective on cultural influences different from those provided from cultural or cross-cultural psychological approaches.  We utilized this approach in the studies described below.
Culture and Human Nature
	Cultural psychology recognizes that the development of the individual is bound up within the process of socialization, that is, the process of the individual orienting him or herself within a system of meaning (Shweder et al., 1998).  Humans have the longest period of socialization of any species, which reflects our great dependency on acquiring cultural sources of meaning.  Geertz (1973) argues that humans are born into an “information gap,” that is, there is a pronounced discrepancy between the amount of instinctual information that is hard-wired into us at birth and the amount of information that we need to survive.  Survival depends on the individual’s ability to successfully learn the language, technology, and customs of his or her surrounding cultural environment.  Thus, humans must come into the world prepared to attend to and seize cultural meanings from around them.  In fact, humans are unique in their tendencies to imitate and mimic novel behaviors of social models (Boyd & Silk, 1997; Tomasello, 2001).  Humans appear to be biologically programmed to seize, make use of, and depend on cultural meanings.
	Indeed, culture itself may have played an integral role in the evolution of our meaning-seizing capacities.  Geertz (1973) maintains that the evolution of culture did not follow human evolution, as has traditionally been assumed, but that the two evolved simultaneously.  Our abilities to make use of cultural information, such as our ability to learn technologies to procure food, to communicate our needs to our caretakers, to make ourselves attractive to potential mates, and to marshal political support for our causes were likely selected throughout our evolution.  That is, the development of culture did not begin after we passed some magical threshold to modern Homo Sapiens, but was a selective force itself in the evolution of our capacities to make use of cultural meanings.  In this way, culture was “ingredient” to our evolution, not just a product of it (Geertz, 1973, p. 47).  Importantly, it was not the ability to make use of specific forms of cultural information that was selected throughout our evolution, but general forms of it.  For example, the ability to master antelope-hunting in the African savanna would only be an evolutionary cost as soon as our ancestors expanded into new environments which contained no antelopes.  Rather, the ability to seize meaning from whatever cultural environment that we were born into would maximize our likelihood of survival.  Our common evolutionary heritage has provided us with a universal mind, although it emerges in one of manifold mentalities through our participation in particular cultural worlds (Shweder et al., 1998).  As Geertz (1973) famously asserted, “we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one” (p. 45).
According to this view, our nature is ultimately that of a cultural being.  It is difficult to conceive of a “cultureless” human, as the process of becoming human is contingent on the orientation of oneself within, and the seizing of meanings from, a particular cultural environment – any cultural environment.  An individual that was somehow raised in isolation from a culture thus would lack some of the very characteristics that we often consider integral to “human nature.1”  The process of normal human development can thus be seen to hinge on being socialized into a particular cultural meaning system.  The question that this paper concerns itself with is what happens to individuals who are socialized into more than one cultural meaning system?
A Sensitive Period for Acquiring a Cultural Meaning System
	To the extent that humans evolved as cultural beings, we should see evidence for our brains being preprogrammed to learn a cultural meaning system.  One such source of evidence would be an indication that there is a sensitive period for being enculturated.  Typically, behavioral skills do not worsen with age; rather they increase.  In contrast, some developmental domains have a sensitive period in which the ability to learn reaches a peak (typically early in life) and quickly drops off.  The existence of a sensitive period suggests that the acquisition of skills occurs by virtue of a set of innate constraints that are present during the sensitive period but weaken with maturation (Newport, 1991).  Computer modeling has revealed that to the extent that the degree of mastery of certain skills confers a survival advantage throughout the individual’s lifespan, a sensitive acquisition period should be evident (Hurford, 1991).
	There is considerable evidence that there is a sensitive period for the acquisition of language (e.g., Hurford, 1991; Lenneberg, 1967; Newport, 1991; but see Singleton, 1989 for a contrary view).  Early in life (before puberty), humans have a superior capacity for acquiring and mastering languages (both first and second languages, although adults may initially outstrip children when they begin to learn a second language; Johnson & Newport, 1989), but this capacity declines with maturation (Lenneberg, 1967; Newport, 1991).  That we learn a language in a particular stage of development, and do not simply acquire one at any point in our lives, is evidence that our capacity for learning language is, as Chomsky put it, “highly useful and very valuable for the perpetuation of the species and so on, a capacity that has obvious selectional value” (1982, pp. 18-19).  We have a biological predisposition to learn a language in this sensitive period.
Learning a language is a necessary aspect of being socialized in a particular culture.  Edward Sapir stated “Language is a great force of socialization, probably the greatest that exists” (Mandelbaum, 1951, p. 15).  In this respect, we should expect that language acquisition parallels cultural acquisition, and to the extent that our ability to seize cultural meanings was a selective force, a sensitive period for cultural learning should also be evident.  
The measurement of the acquisition of culture, however, is much less straightforward than the measurement of the acquisition of language.  Cultures do not have as tangible and measurable a grammar, accent, morphology, or vocabulary.  Despite these methodological challenges, Minoura (1992) launched a large-scale investigation of a sensitive period for learning culture.  She developed an elaborate coding system which assessed the cultural acquisition of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional domains of culture.  Minoura interviewed Japanese-born children who had moved to the US at various different ages.  Her results suggest that people appear to be internalizing cultural meaning systems from birth, however, after 9 years of age some permanence in the retention of learned cultural meanings emerges.  That is, those participants who moved to the US before the age of 9 reported becoming largely “Americanized,” and felt relatively distant from their Japanese heritage.  Those who moved to the US between the ages of 9 and 15 still retained some Japanese cultural sensibilities but also felt reasonably comfortable with American ways.  Those who moved to the US after the age of 15, however, were never able to fully embrace American culture, particularly with respect to their emotional experience.  They continued to see the world through Japanese cultural lenses.  Just as older second language learners often maintain an indelible accent from their mother tongue, older second culture learners often preserve an echo of the emotional repertoire of their mother culture.  
The developmental sequence of culture-learning identified by Minoura nicely coincides with that found in second language acquisition (Johnson & Newport, 1989).  Moreover, the variable that correlated most strongly with American cultural mastery in Minoura’s study was English language ability.  Cultural meaning system acquisition and language acquisition may be inextricably intertwined as they both involve efforts to extract meaning from the social environment.  Thus far, Minoura’s study is the only one to provide empirical data regarding a sensitive period for the acquisition of culture, and although any single study is limited in the extent of its explanatory power, the parallels of her findings with those from studies of language acquisition are compelling.
Living in Two Cultural Worlds
	Most cross-cultural studies have contrasted people from two or more distinct cultures, but some of this research has also included samples of biculturals that are intermediate to the two cultures under study.  For example, Asian-Americans comprise a group that have exposure to both mainstream European-American culture and their family’s traditional Asian culture.  It follows that such individuals should evince ways of thinking intermediate to that of European-American and Asian samples.  In general, studies that have investigated these three cultural groups, on a wide variety of measures relevant to the self, have found evidence consistent with this pattern (e.g., Heine et al., in press; Heine & Lehman, 1997a; 1999; Iyengar, Lepper, & Ross, 1999; Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997; Norenzayan, Choi, & Nisbett, in press).  These results are consistent with the notion that Asian-Americans come to embrace a view of self in between that of European-Americans and Asians.
However, it is not necessarily the case that the self-concept of acculturating groups is the product of some kind of blending of the two self-concepts from their host and home cultures.  Another possibility is that acculturating individuals have access to two cultural meaning systems, and they oscillate between the two of them (e.g., Anderson, 1999; DuBois, 1903/1989; LaFromboise et al., 1993).  The intermediate results obtained in past research with Asian-Americans might thus reflect that at the time of the studies some Asian-Americans were operating in “European-American mode,” whereas others were operating in “Asian mode.”  Indeed, a number of researchers have argued that culture is akin to a meta-schema, and that we can have potential access to multiple meta-schemas at once (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez, 2000; Lee, Aaker, & Gardner, 2000; Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991).  Research consistently reveals that those cultural schemas that are currently activated guide thoughts and behavior.  For example, when primed with thoughts associated with interdependence, individuals from various cultural backgrounds are more likely to make situational attributions (Hong et al., 2000), opt for risky investment decisions (Mandel, 2000), adopt a prevention focus (Lee et al., 2000), or place more emphasis on attending to social norms (Ybarra & Trafimow, 1998).  In this regard, moving to a new cultural context involves the socialization of a new cultural meaning system that exists parallel to the system of the individual’s original culture.  The notion that there is a sensitive period for cultural acquisition suggests that the chronic accessibility of a cultural metaschema is more likely if it is acquired before puberty.
Acculturation of Self-Esteem
	Self-esteem is the most researched construct related to the self-concept; over 18,000 studies investigating it have been published over the past 35 years (this is a rate of over one publication per day!).  Since many of these studies were conducted across cultures we have an empirical base with which to evaluate cultural influences on self-esteem.  To the extent that we can identify a clear pattern of cultural differences on self-esteem, we can explore acculturative changes of self-esteem when individuals from one culture migrate to a culture that sustains different levels of self-esteem.
 	Much research suggests that values associated with individualism and independence are associated with higher self-esteem (e.g., Heine, in press-a).  A cultural orientation that views individuals as the basic social unit will also tend to encourage people to believe in their own integrity qua individuals.  In North America, for example, where individualism is prized, the culture urges individuals to view themselves as independently functioning agents (e.g., Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swindler, & Tipton, 1985; Sampson, 1977).  People who embrace an independent view of self tend to have a sense of identity that is anchored in its internal attributes, and is viewed as the source of action and the center of control (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).  Maintaining this autonomous sense of agency and identity is fostered by identifying and affirming these inner attributes (Heine, in press-a).  A habitual positive self-view confirms for the individual that they possess the requisite characteristics to fulfill cultural tasks associated with independence, self-sufficiency, and autonomy (Heine et al., 1999).  
It follows then that the more autonomous and self-sufficient individuals perceive themselves, the more positively they should feel.  Evidence for these relations are found in correlational studies of self-esteem and independent views of self:  Regardless of the culture within which the study is conducted, people who have a more independent view of self also report higher self-esteem (correlations range from .33 to .52 within cultures; Heine et al., 1999; Singelis, Bond, Lai, & Sharkey, 1999; comparable correlations have been identified between independence and self-enhancement; Heine & Renshaw, in press).  There is thus a considerable degree of overlap between the concepts of independence and positive self-views.
A Confucian framework of interdependence, which is at the core of the self in many East Asian cultures, including Japan (e.g., Heine, in press-b; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Su et al., 1999), provides an alternative conception of self.  This view of self brings with it cultural goals that conflict with desires to be self-sufficient and autonomous.  Individuals are connected to each other via relationships 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 defined by a clear set of obligations and duties towards other members of their groups.  Inadequate performance of the duties associated with one’s roles indicates that the individual 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’ commitment to in-group members renders them obligated to live up to the standards associated with their roles – standards that are importantly not determined by the individuals themselves but consensually by others in the hierarchy, and to a certain extent by society as a whole (Heine et al., in press; Kitayama et al., 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 one is not doing their part towards the group’s success.  They must be vigilant to any shortcomings indicating where they need to make greater efforts to better fulfill their roles.  This orientation, in contrast to self-enhancement, is termed self-criticism (Heine et al., 1999).
This reasoning suggests that interdependence is not associated with enhanced positive self-views, and may even be linked with more self-critical views.  Correlational studies conducted with a variety of measures of interdependence and positive self-views reveal that, regardless of the culture in which the study was conducted, individuals higher in interdependence do not have higher self-esteem or show evidence of greater self-enhancement  (rs range from -.01 to -.44 within cultures; Heine et al., 1999; Heine & Renshaw, in press; Kiuchi, 1996; Singelis et al., 1999; Yamaguchi, 1994).  Interdependence is orthogonal, or even antagonistic, to positive self-views, within North American and East Asian cultures.  
This difference in the relations between independence and interdependence and self-esteem within cultures, suggests that there should be corresponding differences in self-esteem between cultures that differ in terms of their independence and interdependence.  Much evidence from a variety of disciplines has suggested that values associated with independence are most closely associated with North Americans (Bellah et al., 1985; Lipset, 1996; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sampson, 1977; Triandis, 1989) whereas those associated with interdependence are more strongly embraced by East Asians, particularly Japanese (Bachnik & Quinn, 1994; Hamaguchi, 1985; Lebra, 1976; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989; but note the lack of supportive psychometric evidence on trait measures for this cultural difference; Matsumoto, 1999; Takano & Osaka, 1999, and explanations for this lack of support; Heine et al., 2001; Peng et al., 1997).  Thus, evidence of high self-esteem should be less evident in East Asian cultures such as Japan than it is in North America.
Evidence of Cultural Differences in Self-Esteem between Japanese and North Americans
Empirical research on positive self-views can be roughly divided into three categories: possessing, enhancing, and maintaining positive self-views.  A review of the evidence in each domain among North American and Japanese samples reveals pronounced cultural differences.  
Possessing a positive self-view.  In a review of the Western self-esteem literature, Baumeister, Tice and Hutton (1989) observed that, without exception, the mean and/or median self-esteem scores were higher than the conceptual midpoints of the scales, regardless of the measures used.  Thus, the distributions of self-esteem scores are heavily skewed such that the vast majority of North Americans report having high self-esteem.  The characteristic self-evaluation for those living in a culture characterized by independence and individualism, namely North America, is unambiguously positive.  North Americans who do not tend to endorse items about their value as an individual (i.e., who score below the theoretical midpoint on self-esteem inventories) are relatively rare (less than 7% of one large European-Canadian sample; Heine et al., 1999).
Such positive views of self are not as common among Japanese.  Kashiwagi (1986) suggests that a “negative evaluation of the self, or strong awareness of weaker aspects of self, is sometimes pointed to as one of the general characteristics of self-concept among the Japanese” (p. 180).  This self-critical orientation is reflected in their self-esteem scores.  Japanese consistently have exhibited lower self-esteem scores than North Americans (e.g., Bond & Cheung, 1983; Yeh, 1995; similar cultural differences have also been noted for subjective well-being, Diener & Diener, 1995), and in contrast to the heavily skewed distributions found in North American studies of self-esteem, Japanese’ mean self-esteem scores are roughly normally distributed around the theoretical midpoint of the scale (Heine et al., 1999).  
Self-critical views among Japanese are also evident in measures of actual-ideal self-discrepancies.  These discrepancies indicate feelings of dissatisfaction with one’s current self, a proxy for self-criticism.  Japanese exhibited larger actual-ideal and actual-ought self discrepancies than North Americans (Heine & Lehman, 1999; Meijer, Heine, & Yamagami, 1999), and importantly, these self-critical views appear to be associated with fewer negative consequences, such as depression, for Japanese compared with North Americans (Heine & Lehman, 1999).  
Enhancing the Positivity of One’s Self-View.  The importance of a positive self-view in North American culture is further documented in research on self-enhancing biases.  Reviews of this literature (e.g., Greenwald, 1980; Miller & Ross, 1975; Taylor & Brown, 1988) indicate that North American’s self-perceptions tend to be systematically biased toward an overly positive view of the self.
There is much less evidence for self-enhancement among Japanese than North Americans.  Cross-cultural studies reveal that the better-than-average effect (Heine & Lehman, 1997a; Heine & Renshaw, in press; Markus & Kitayama, 1991), unrealistic optimism (Heine & Lehman, 1995), and self-serving attributional biases (e.g., Kitayama, Takagi, & Matsumoto, 1995) are less pronounced among Japanese compared with North Americans.  Everyday situations in Japan are seen more in terms of opportunities for self-criticism, in contrast to the clear self-enhancing opportunities perceived by North Americans (Kitayama et al., 1997).  The literature indicates that self-enhancement is not as strong a motivation among Japanese.  
Maintaining a Positive Self-View.  Further testimony to the importance of positive self-views in Western culture is found in the ever-growing body of research on self-evaluation maintenance.  This literature documents the variety of compensatory self-protective responses that are elicited when people encounter threats to their self-esteem.  Such strategies include: self-evaluation maintenance (e.g., Tesser, 1988), self-affirmation and dissonance reduction (e.g., Steele, 1988), compensatory self-enhancement (e.g., Baumeister & Jones, 1978), downward social comparison (e.g., Wills, 1981), motivated reasoning (e.g., Kunda, 1990), and self-handicapping (e.g., Tice, 1991).  That such a wide variety of self-esteem maintenance tactics exists highlights the importance of maintaining a positive self-evaluation, at least within North American culture.
In contrast, few clear demonstrations of any of the aforementioned self-esteem maintenance strategies have been found with East Asian samples (e.g., Cross, Liao, & Josephs, 1992).  A cross-cultural laboratory study with Canadians and Japanese failed to find evidence for dissonance reduction or self-affirmation among Japanese in contrast to the pronounced effects among Canadians (Heine & Lehman, 1997b).  Japanese have been found to demonstrate a reverse compensatory self-enhancement effect, in which they respond to negative self-relevant feedback by decreasing their self-evaluations in other unrelated domains (Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, in press).  A recent cross-cultural exploration of motivated reasoning biases found that Americans were more inclined to believe ostensible scientific arguments that cell phone use leads to hearing loss if they didn’t use a cell phone regularly, whereas Japanese agreement was unaffected by their own cell phone use (Heine, 2001).  
Other research provides striking evidence of self-critical tendencies among Japanese.  For example, Japanese are more likely to attend to and recall negative than positive information, whereas Americans demonstrate the opposite tendency (Meijer et al., 1999).  Canadians tend to be more easily convinced of their successes than their failures, whereas Japanese are quicker to conclude that they have failed than succeeded (Heine, Takata, & Lehman, 2000).  Moreover, this vigilance for information indicating weaknesses appears to serve an important function for Japanese: it highlights where they need to direct efforts for self-improvement.  A series of cross-cultural laboratory studies on intrinsic motivation revealed that Japanese persisted longer when they discovered a shortcoming in their performance, whereas North Americans persisted longer when they discovered a strength (Heine et al., in press).  Self-criticism in Japan thus appears to serve a similar purpose to self-enhancement in North America: it enables people to perform at their best
Much convergent evidence thus indicates that tendencies to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views are less evident among Japanese than among North Americans.  These differences are also evident for those aspects of their selves that Japanese view as most important to them (Heine et al., in press; Heine & Lehman, 1999; Heine & Renshaw, in press; but see Ito, 1999, for evidence of the opposite pattern among Japanese), and in studies conducted with hidden or behavioral measures (see Heine et al., 1999 for a review), and thus cannot be interpreted as solely due to cultural differences in self-presentation norms.  Motivations to maintain a positive self-view, as it is typically operationalized in the literature, are less evident among Japanese compared with North Americans (although Japanese surely have other important self-relevant motivations, such as a desire to maintain face; Heine et al., 1999).
To the extent that habitual positive evaluations of the self (i.e., self-esteem) are fostered by cultural experiences that emphasize the independence and autonomy of the individual, time spent in a Western cultural environment should be associated with exposure to a dialogue that stresses the value of possessing positive self-views.  That is, with exposure to the cultural values, scripts, practices, customs, institutions that are hypothesized to encourage self-enhancement (see Heine et al., 1999 for a review) it would seem that individuals would respond to these cultural meanings and become sensitive to detecting positive features within themselves.  In short, exposure to Western culture should be associated with positive self-views.  
The process of acculturation provides us with a unique window through which to investigate such effects of culture.  When an individual moves to a new culture he or she will likely undergo some kind of “psychological acculturation” (Graves, 1967), learning how to interact within his or her new cultural environment.  With increasing time spent in the host culture, it is likely that the host culture’s influence on the individual’s self-concept and ways of thinking will also increase.  Experiences in a new cultural environment may thus lead individuals to adopt ways of viewing themselves that are normative within the host cultural environment.  One way of investigating the relation between self-esteem and Western cultural values is to analyze acculturating individuals’ self-esteem scores at various points in the acculturation process.
Study 1
Method and Results
We sought to investigate whether there are differences in self-esteem among individuals who differ in their exposure to Western culture.  We had included the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) in a large number of questionnaire studies that were conducted with students from universities in Vancouver, Canada and in a variety of cities in Japan.  We created a large file that included participants’ self-esteem responses and some demographic variables (a total of over 5000 participants).  The participants came from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Canada, and from Aichi Gakuin, Doshisha University, Kansai Gaikokugo University, Kyoto University, Nagasaki University, Nara University, Ritsumeikan University, and Toyama University in Japan.  Japanese participants completed the scale in Japanese and Canadian participants completed the scale in English.  The original Rosenberg Scale was translated into Japanese, back-translated into English, and any discrepancies between the two versions were discussed among three translators.
As a large proportion of university students in the two Canadian universities are of Asian descent, from a variety of different countries with the most common ethnic heritage being Chinese (self-criticism is also evident among Chinese; e.g., Yik, Bond, & Paulhus, 1998), and that a significant number of the Japanese students had spent time in a Western country, we were able to analyze the data with respect to how much time participants had been exposed to Western culture2.  A continuum of increasing exposure to Western culture was created by classifying participants into the following groups: 1) Japanese who had never been outside of Japan (n=1657); 2) Japanese who had spent some time in a Western country (n=577); 3) Recent Asian immigrants to Canada (n=244); 4) Long-term Asian immigrants to Canada (n=289); 5) Second generation Asian-Canadians (n=431); 6) Third generation Asian-Canadians (n=38); 7) European-Canadians (n=1466).  A total of 388 participants from a variety of ethnic backgrounds did not fit any of these categories and were not included in the analyses. 
	We conducted a culture by sex ANOVA on self-esteem for the entire sample.  A pronounced difference for culture emerged, F(6, 4690) = 244.86, p < .001, which is depicted in Figure 1.  Replicating past research, European-Canadians scored higher on self-esteem than did Japanese (they scored higher on 9 of the 10 items; the item, “I certainly feel useless at times” showed no cultural difference).  The other cultural groups formed a remarkably monotonically increasing pattern between these two extremes.  Self-esteem rose among people of Asian descent with exposure to Western culture to the point that 3rd-generation Asian-Canadians had self-esteem scores that approximated those of European-Canadians.  The more exposure individuals had to cultural situations, scripts, and institutions associated with higher self-esteem, the more positively they viewed themselves.  The small size of the 3rd-generation Asian-Canadian sample warrant caution in interpreting the results, but if we assume it is reliable this suggests that three generations is enough for people of Asian descent to fully acculturate to Canadian culture in terms of their self-esteem3. 
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Insert Figure 1 about here.
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	Cross-sectional studies such as this have some interpretative limitations.  For example, there may be cohort effects distinguishing the different cultural groups in terms of a number of demographic variables, such as their reasons for migrating to Canada, their past education history, or their performance at school, which may relate to their self-esteem scores.  We felt it was imperative to replicate this basic finding employing a controlled longitudinal design in order to avoid these interpretive ambiguities.  Three separate longitudinal studies were conducted in which individuals’ self-esteem was measured at 2 points in time: 1) before leaving one’s home culture (or just after arriving in the host culture) and 2) 7 months after having lived in the host culture.
Study 2a
Method and Results
	Two days after arriving in Vancouver to begin an 8-month exchange program, 84 students from Ritsumeikan University (out of 99 who were enrolled in the program) agreed to participate in a questionnaire study.  One of the measures in the questionnaire was Rosenberg’s (1965) Self-Esteem Scale.  Approximately 7 months later, in one of their classes, the students were invited to attend an evening lecture during which a second questionnaire, which also included the Rosenberg Scale, was distributed.  Participants completed Japanese versions of the scale at both points in time.
	Unfortunately, because many students were not in class when the announcement was made, only 35 students attended the lecture and participated in Wave 2 of the study4.  A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted on the 35 students who participated in both waves of the questionnaire.  Participants showed higher self-esteem at Wave 2, M = 38.5, than at Wave 1, M = 36.7; F[1, 33] = 4.04, p = .052 (see Figure 2).  Hence, Japanese exchange students exhibited an increase in their self-esteem after living in Canada for 7 months.
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Insert Figure 2 about here.
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Study 2b
	A potential confound of Study 2a is that acculturation experiences per se might have led to the self-esteem increases of the Japanese sample.  Perhaps anyone who moves to a new cultural environment, regardless of their cultural background or destination, experiences increases in self-esteem due to their expanding horizons and feelings of competence associated with being able to survive in a foreign environment.  To the extent that it is experiences in North American culture that are associated with self-enhancement (or experiences in Japanese culture that are associated with self-criticism; Heine et al., 1999; Kitayama et al., 1997), and not acculturation experiences per se, we should expect to see self-esteem decreases among North Americans moving to Japan.  Study 2b investigated this possibility.
Method and Results
	Shortly before leaving Canada, 73 Canadian English teachers who were heading to Japan to participate in the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program completed a questionnaire packet including Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale.  Seven months later the teachers were mailed a second questionnaire that also included the Rosenberg Scale.  Sixty-nine of the teachers completed the second wave of the study.  A repeated measures ANOVA reveals that the teachers’ self-esteem was lower at Wave 2, M = 42.16, than at Wave 1, M = 43.15; F (1, 67) = 4.93, p < .03.  Canadian English teachers thus displayed a decrease in their self-esteem after living in Japan for 7 months.  Acculturation experiences per se are not associated with increasing levels of self-esteem.  Canadians who were removed from a cultural environment that bolsters self-esteem and placed in an environment characterized by various practices associated with self-criticism (e.g., Heine et al., 1999; Lewis, 1995) appeared to become more self-critical after 7 months.
Study 2c
	Study 2c sought to replicate the self-esteem increase among Japanese students in Study 2a, and to explore whether acculturation attitudes moderated the relation between mere exposure to Western culture and the internalization of Western cultural norms.
Method and Results
	One month prior to leaving Japan, 82 Ritsumeikan University students (out of 93 who were enrolled in the program) who were heading to Vancouver as exchange students were given a questionnaire packet including Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale.  Seven months after arriving in Canada, 74 students completed a second questionnaire as part of a class project, which also included Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale as well as John Berry and colleagues’ Acculturation Attitudes Scale (Berry, Kim, Power, Young, & Bujaki, 1989), which was modified specifically for Japanese exchange students coming to Canada (Davis, 1995).  This scale assesses the positivity of students’ attitudes towards Canada and Japan, and this scale was included to investigate whether individual differences in attitudes towards Canada relate to self-esteem change.
	A repeated measures ANOVA revealed that students’ self-esteem scores were nominally, although not significantly, higher at Wave 2 (M = 34.5) than at Wave 1 (M = 34.2; F < 1).  Hence, we failed to replicate the significant increase in self-esteem among Japanese exchange students living in Canada that was demonstrated in Study 1.  
	An overall composite of subjects’ acculturation attitudes was formed by summing all the items expressing positive attitudes towards Canada (Assimilation and Integration subscales) and subtracting the items expressing negative attitudes towards Canada (Separation and Marginal subscales).  This total value reflects how positive students’ attitudes were towards Canadian culture, and is a proxy for how much students made efforts to “become Canadian” while on the exchange program.  This total acculturation score was then correlated with participants’ self-esteem change scores.  This analysis revealed a positive relation between how positive participants’ attitudes were towards Canadian lifestyles and how much their self-esteem increased, r = .32, p < .01.  That is, the more participants were open to Canadian culture (and theoretically the more they were influenced by Canadian cultural values), the more their self-esteem increased during their stay in Canada.  This provides another source of evidence to suggest that the self-concepts of those who were participating in Canadian culture were influenced by the cultural environment.  
General Discussion
	The investigation of the ways in which culture affects the self-concept is fraught with methodological obstacles.  For example, there are no appropriate control groups of “cultureless” humans with which to compare the different varieties of “cultured” ones, there are no direct measures of cultural grammars, and people cannot be randomly assigned to different cultural environments.  One quasi-experimental approach, however, which rarely has been pursued, investigates changes in the self-concept that occur during sojourns to new cultures. 
We investigated acculturative effects on an evaluative component of the self-concept: global self-esteem.  Much research has maintained that self-esteem, as it has traditionally been operationalized within Western psychology, is a construct that is enhanced by participation in North American culture (e.g., Heine, in press-a; Heine et al., 1999; Kitayama et al., 1997; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).  The results of the present studies provide further evidence that self-esteem is intimately related with Western cultural values.  Study 1 revealed a clear relation between self-esteem and exposure to North American culture in a large-scale cross-sectional study.  Study 2a demonstrated that time spent in Canada led to an increase in self-esteem for Japanese students, whereas Study 2b revealed that time spent in Japan led to a decrease in self-esteem for Canadians.  Exposure to new cultural environments seems to have been associated with movement in sojourners’ self-esteem towards levels that are normative of their host cultures.  Study 2c failed to replicate the significant self-esteem increase found in Study 2a, but demonstrated that those Japanese most receptive to Canadian cultural values displayed a greater increase in self-esteem than those who resisted the host culture.  This relation is also consistent with the notion that greater exposure to Western culture leads to higher self-esteem.  Taken together, these four studies are suggestive of a significant Western cultural component in the construct of self-esteem.  One interpretation of these results, consistent with past research with biculturals (e.g., Hong et al., 2000), is that the longer one is in a culture the more likely it is that the metaschema of thoughts and feelings that is activated in them is associated with the host culture.
Cultural differences in self-esteem between Japanese and North Americans appear to yield some of the largest effect sizes between cultures of any of the aspects of the self-concept investigated thus far (the effect size in Study 1 between the European-Canadians and Japanese who had never been abroad was 1.35), and there is much theoretical reasoning consistent with these cultural differences (e.g., Heine, in press-a; Heine et al., in press; Heine et al., 1999; Kitayama et al., 1997; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).  In these respects, self-esteem is an especially useful tool for identifying acculturative effects on the self-concept.  However, self-esteem is likely also confounded by experiences of success and failure that are part and parcel of the acculturation experience, and thus the self-esteem assessments obtained here are unlikely to be pure measures of acculturation.  Future research investigating other aspects of the self-concept known to be influenced by culture, such as tendencies to make situational attributions (Hong et al., 2000), perceptions of agency (Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, in press), self-improving motivations (Heine et al., in press) or feelings of independence (Singelis, 1994) could move the field forward.
In the present studies we compared mean scores on subjective Likert scale attitude measures across cultural groups. Such comparisons can potentially be undermined by reference-group effects (Heine et al., 2001).  That is, people evaluate themselves by implicitly comparing themselves to those around them.  What makes this problematic for cross-cultural comparisons is that people from different cultures are comparing themselves to different referents (Biernat & Manis, 1994; Heine et al., 2001; Heine et al., in press; Peng et al., 1997).  However, that we found evidence for Japanese self-esteem increasing when surrounded by higher self-esteem Canadians, and for Canadian self-esteem decreasing when surrounded by lower self-esteem Japanese is not consistent with the notion that the findings are due to the different reference groups of the samples.
Much past research on acculturation has assumed that the lower self-esteem scores among sojourners and immigrants reflects the psychological distress inherent in difficulties in the acculturation experience (e.g., Furnham & Bochner, 1986; Taft, 1977).  Although it is possible that negative experiences associated with “culture shock” lead to lower self-esteem, the present findings suggest that this is not the best explanation to account for the relatively low self-esteem of immigrating Asians.  Japanese have the lowest self-esteem scores before they have left their country, and the self-esteem scores of Asian immigrants in North America are only low relative to those of European-descent North Americans or 2nd and 3rd generation Asian-descent North Americans.  In comparison to their compatriots in their home cultures, the self-esteem scores of Asian sojourners and immigrants are relatively high.
That we observed changes in self-esteem in sojourns as brief as 7 months provides testimony to the influences culture has on the self-concept.  Moreover, that these differences were found with young adults suggests that people continue to seek cultural meaning systems even after they have been socialized in a different culture.  To the extent that there is a sensitive period for acquiring a cultural meaning system before puberty (e.g., Minoura, 1992), we assume that the changes in self-esteem observed in the present studies would have been larger had we conducted the study with prepubescent children.  The clearest evidence of acculturative effects on the self-concept should be observable among children, whose more plastic minds are still adjusting to the cultural meanings with which they interact.
Move the Body, Change the Culture?
The acculturating individual provides one perspective by which to view the mutual constitution of self and culture.  When individuals participate in a novel cultural environment, their self-concept appears to change accordingly.  The self is shaped by cultural experiences. 
However, cultural influences on the self-concept represent only one side of the relations between self and culture hypothesized by cultural psychologists (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Shweder, 1990).  Cultures arise from the interaction of the individual selves that make them up.  As new individuals move into a culture, changing the composition of the culture’s membership, it follows that the culture should change as well.  Cultures are shaped by individual selves.  How are cultures affected by the incorporation of new members from different cultural backgrounds?
The impact of immigrating selves on a culture would appear to hinge on the model of cultural integration that is dominant.  It seems that there are at least two models by which cultures incorporate new members.  One potential model is sometimes referred to as a “melting pot (e.g., Sidanius, Feschbach, Levin, & Pratto, 1997).”  New cultural members assimilate themselves to fit into a single, dominant cultural framework, regardless of the individuals’ original cultural backgrounds.  The incongruities of the individual’s heritage culture and the host culture are resolved by the individuals “melting” away the cultural idiosyncracies from their heritage culture.  In this model, it would appear that the host culture does little to accommodate the new selves.  The adjustment largely occurs in the immigrants’ selves, whereas the dominant culture would continue to persist, largely unchanged.  
That aspects of cultures often are relatively stable, despite the great influx of new members, provides support for the notion that sometimes acculturating individuals are assimilating into, rather than changing, the cultures.  For example, Vandello and Cohen (this volume) provide compelling evidence that a culture of honor persists in the Southern US, despite that the original basis of this aspect of the culture (a herding-based economy) is no longer dominant.  It appears that people who migrate to the US South, whether they are from other states or other countries, are socialized to believe that defending one’s honor is an important way to earn others’ respect.  Even if every individual member of the culture is ultimately replaced by subsequent individuals who join the culture either by birth or migration, each of the new individuals must adjust themselves to the prevailing cultural worldview, and adopt thoughts and behaviors that are associated with perceived greater rewards in that worldview.  Such cultural persistence would seem to be more prevalent in cultures in which a clear dominant model is identifiable, tangible, and desirable to the acculturating individuals.  
A second way by which cultures integrate new members can be described as an “ethnic pluralism” model, which is sometimes referred to as a “salad bowl” (e.g., Sidanius et al., 1997).  This model refers to the coexistence of a number of ethnic subgroups within a society, each preserving their own distinctive cultural heritages.  Although acculturating individuals tend to learn the ways of the host culture, they do not shed their cultural backgrounds.  In such a model, a dominant cultural framework would appear to be somewhat weak and intangible; the culture consists of the collective sum of the individual subcultural elements.  
For individuals acculturating into an ethnically pluralistic culture characterized, in contrast to those acculturating into a melting pot, the impact of the migration would appear to be considerably greater on the culture.  To the extent that a dominant cultural model is not as tangible or stable in pluralistic societies, there would appear to be less pressure for individuals to assimilate.  Rather, the host culture itself must change to accommodate these new individuals.  Ethnically pluralistic societies would appear to have less persistence of cultural ways, as the influx of people with different cultural backgrounds would change the perception of what thoughts and behaviors are normative, or are associated with benefits and costs.  
In the concrete example of self-esteem change among acculturating individuals it would seem that self-esteem change should be more pronounced to the extent that a melting pot model is in operation.  Low self-esteem individuals moving to a culture characterized by higher self-esteem, for example, would tend to learn a culturally-congruent form of self, and their self-esteem would subsequently increase to that of the cultural norm, leaving the cultures’ perceived norm for largely intact.  In contrast, low self-esteem individuals acculturating into an ethnically pluralistic society would likely assimilate less, as their self-concept is not divergent from their subculture’s dominant view of self.  Ethnically pluralistic societies should be more likely to preserve the self-concept of immigrating individuals, and the overarching culture would adjust in response to the change in the proportions of the various subcultures. 
Conclusion
In this age of globalization, a growing number of bodies are moving back and forth across cultural boundaries.  Such migrations are likely to leave their tracks both on the selves of the individuals that are acculturating, and on the cultures that are exchanging the selves.  Individual selves need to assimilate to new cultural environments, and cultures need to accommodate the new selves.  The effects of this self-concept assimilation and cultural accommodation are only beginning to be examined.  A number of questions have appeared in the literature, but thus far scant research has explored them.  Is there a sensitive period for the acquisition of a cultural meaning system (e.g., Minoura,1992) as there appears to be with language acquisition (e.g., Newport, 1991)?  Do multicultural individuals consistently maintain multiple selves (e.g., Hong et al., 2000), or is there an inevitable blending at some point?  Do all aspects of the self-concept assimilate in the same ways that we observed in the acculturation of self-esteem?  Questions regarding how cultures accommodate new members and new ideas are legion, and this volume sets the stage for much future work.
	Finding the culture in the self is a pursuit compromised by many methodological challenges.  Conventional cross-cultural and cultural psychological methodologies each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and we suggest that research on acculturative effects on the self-concept provides another tool with which to identify the cultural components of human nature.  To the extent that evidence from these different approaches converges, the cultural foundation of the self will come into fuller view.

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Footnotes
1 Perhaps the closest example of relatively “culture-free” humans can be observed in autistic children, who are less able to interact with their environment in a way that enables the internalization of cultural meanings.  Indeed, in many ways the thoughts and behavior of autistic children do appear to be somewhat free of cultural influences (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993) and also somewhat different from the thoughts and behavior we typically associate with normal human functioning.  Similarly, extreme cases of cultural deprivation such as that inflicted on “Genie” by her abusing father (she was isolated in an attic until the age of 13), also seem to impair thoughts and behavior relative to those raised to participate in a culture (Curtiss, 1977). We must remember, though, that each of these culturally-deprived cases makes poor controls to compare with fully “cultured” individuals as there are many confounding variables.
2 We reported the results of a similar analysis in Heine et al. (1999), however we have since collected more data that is included in the present analyses.
3  Surprisingly, there was no main effect for sex despite the massive size of this sample, F(1, 4690) = 1.83, ns.  However, the results are qualified by a small culture by sex interaction, F(6, 4690) = 4.24, p < .001.  Males exhibited nominally higher self-esteem scores than females in the “Been Abroad Japanese,” “Long-Term Asian-Canadian,” “2nd generation Asian-Canadian,” and “European-Canadian” samples, but females had nominally higher self-esteem scores than males in the “Never Been Abroad Japanese,” “Recent Asian-Canadians,” and “3rd generation Asian-Canadian” samples.  We are at a loss for making sense of this pattern of sex differences.
4The considerable attrition of this sample necessitates caution in interpreting the results.  In an effort to determine the impact of the sample’s attrition on the results, we conducted an ANOVA comparing the self-esteem scores at Wave 1 of those who only completed the questionnaire at Wave 1 and those who completed them for both waves.  The 2 groups did not differ in their self-esteem at Wave 1, F < 1, suggesting that participation in the second lecture is not related to the student’s initial level of self-esteem.  Moreover, it is difficult to conceive how those who came to the lecture should differ from those who did not in the extent of their self-esteem change.  This suggests that the attrition of the sample did not unduly influence our measurement of self-esteem change across waves 1 and 2.

Figure Captions

1.	Cross-sectional Comparisons of Self-Esteem

2.	Longitudinal Comparisons of Self-Esteem

J – 	Japanese who have never been abroad
BAJ – 	“Been Abroad Japanese” (i.e., they have spent time in a Western country).
RAC – 	“Recent Asian-Canadians” (i.e., they have moved to Canada within the past 7 years)
LAC – 	“Long-Term Asian-Canadians” (i.e., they have moved to Canada more than 7 years ago)
2AC – 	Second-generation Asian-Canadians
3AC – 	Third-generation Asian-Canadians
EC – 	European-Canadians