Optimal is as Optimal does

Steven J. Heine
University of British Columbia

Please address correspondence to:
Steven J. Heine
2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4  Canada
Tel: (604) 822-6908.  Fax (604) 822-6923
E-mail: heine@psych.ubc.ca

Invited paper to appear in  Psychological Inquiry.

Optimal is as Optimal does
When can we say that something is optimal?  Providing an answer to this question requires us to consider the costs and benefits associated with different alternatives, and to declare the one with the best overall payoff as “optimal.”  Of course, the costs and benefits of any object or process are not intrinsic to the objects or processes themselves; the payoffs are accrued by interacting with a system that renders consequences of the object or process as costly or beneficial.  For example, consider the question “What is the optimal tool to have in one’s toolbox?”  The answer to this is contingent upon the environment within which one lives.  If one lives in a world held together by screws then the optimal tool would be the screwdriver; life in a world of nails would dictate that the hammer is the best solution.  There is nothing inherent about screwdrivers or hammers by themselves that makes them optimal tools; it is only through their interaction with their environment that their optimality is afforded.  
The same rationale needs to be applied to the question “What is optimal self-esteem?”  Kernis conceptualizes optimal self-esteem as that which is high, genuine, and stable.  He provides much convergent evidence that this kind of self-esteem may indeed provide the best payoff, warranting its label of “optimal.”  However, it does not appear to me that there is anything intrinsic about the self in isolation that renders this kind of self-esteem as optimal.  It is only by considering the contingencies of the environment that afford this maximal payoff to the self are we able to conceive of this as optimal self-esteem.  To the extent that these contingencies are not constant across different contexts or cultures, the nature of optimal self-esteem will also vary accordingly.  It is my contention that cultures vary significantly in terms of the contingencies associated with what Kernis describes as the features of optimal self-esteem.  
One feature of optimal self-esteem is that it arises from the “operation of one’s core, true, authentic self as a source of input to behavioral choices” (ms. pg. 32).  Kernis describes an authentic self as one that is unified and is experienced similarly across contexts.  Behavior arises from individuals acting in accordance with their values, preferences, and needs, rather than by behaving in ways that are sensitive to others’ expectations or contextual pressures.  It seems reasonable to me that this logic often holds true within a North American cultural context, in which authenticity and inner-directed behavior are encouraged and valued.
However, acting in accordance with one’s “true” self would seem to be of considerably less utility in some other cultures, for example, within a Japanese cultural context.  Much literature has described the self-concept common in Japan as largely a relational phenomenon (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), in which an individual’s relationships and roles within particular contexts take precedence over abstracted and internalized attributes, such as attitudes, traits, and abilities (Cousins, 1989).  Hence, thoughts and behaviors need to be adjusted to the role requirements of a given situation.  The ability to distinguish between the demands across situations (kejime in Japanese), and to behave appropriately is viewed as integral to a Japanese individual’s maturity in ways that it is not in North America (Bachnik, 1992).  From a theoretical perspective, “authenticity,” in the way that Kernis defines it, is of less value in Japan than in North America.
There is much empirical evidence to show that acting in ways with consistent with an inner self yields a smaller return in East Asian than in North American contexts.  First, much evidence reveals that East Asians act less consistently across different contexts than do North Americans (e.g., Campbell et al., 1996; Kanagawa, Cross, & Markus, 2001; Suh, 2002).  Second, this inconsistent behavior appears to be associated with fewer costs in East Asia than in North America.  Campbell et al. (1996) found that the correlation between self-esteem and self-concept clarity was significantly larger for Canadians than it was for Japanese.  Suh (2002) demonstrated that although cross-context consistency was beneficial for Americans in the sense that consistent people were liked more by their friends and had higher subjective well-being than did less consistent people, the correlations were significantly smaller for Koreans (and they did not show any relation between consistency and being liked).  Likewise, Heine and Renshaw (in press) found clear self-verification effects in an American sample, where people reported more liking for those who viewed them similarly to how they viewed themselves compared with those who viewed them differently.  In contrast, Japanese showed no relation between liking and self-peer agreement.  There are fewer benefits for viewing oneself as consistent or “authentic” in an East Asian context, and hence, it would not appear to be an optimal way of viewing oneself.  
Kernis’s optimal self-esteem is not just authentic self-esteem – it is authentic high self-esteem.  Indeed, there would appear to be few benefits of having authentic low self-esteem, and of acting consistently with this authentic knowledge.  Kernis makes a compelling case that high authentic self-esteem has a decent payoff in North American contexts, but are these benefits realized universally? 
One source of evidence regarding the functionality of high self-esteem is the prevalence of it.  One of the most consistently found cultural differences is that North Americans have far higher self-esteem scores than do Japanese (the effect sizes are often greater than 1; Heine & Lehman, in press).  Kernis suggests that the cultural differences in self-esteem might be due to there being more North Americans than Japanese with high fragile self-esteem, but not those with high secure self-esteem.  I don’t know of any evidence to support this contention.  A wide array of laboratory and questionnaire studies consistently reveals that North Americans embrace positive self-views to a greater extent than do Japanese (for a review see Heine, in press).
Furthermore, positive self-views appear to have fewer benefits for Japanese than North Americans.  When North Americans discover a positive aspect of themselves they work harder; in contrast, Japanese work harder when they discover a negative aspect of themselves (Heine et al., 2001).  North Americans show a tight linkage between self-critical thoughts (measured with actual-ideal discrepancies) and depression (Higgins, 1987).  In contrast, this correlation is significantly less pronounced among Japanese (Heine & Lehman, 1999).  There apparently are fewer benefits for maintaining high self-esteem in Japan than in North America.   
Why would there be differential payoffs for having positive self-views across cultures?  I have argued elsewhere (Heine, in press) that positive self-views are more beneficial in contexts in which: 1) independence is encouraged more than interdependence; 2) intrapsychic concerns are given more weight than interpersonal ones; 3) an internal frame of awareness is favored over an external one; and 4) an entity theory of self is embraced rather than an incremental one.  That these contexts are more common in North America than in Japan render positive self-views more functional there.  Because different contexts are more common in Japan than in North America, the nature of optimal self-esteem must be different there as well.
In sum, much evidence reveals that both of the two components of optimal self-esteem that Kernis describes, the authentic component, and the positive self-view component, are more common, and are more functional in North America than they are in Japan.  Authentic high self-esteem is optimal in North America because the cultural environment there affords a better payoff compared with other kinds of self-esteem.  In contrast, behaving in situationally appropriate ways (e.g., Suh, 2002) and maintaining a self-critical perspective (e.g., Heine et al., 2001) yields a good (and perhaps optimal) payoff in Japan because of the contingencies between the self-concept and cultural environment there. 

References
Bachnik, J. (1992). Kejime: Defining a shifting self in multiple organizational modes.  In N. R. Rosenberger (Ed). Japanese Sense of Self (pp. 152-172).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavallee, L. F., & Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 141-156.
Cousins, S. D. (1989). Culture and selfhood in Japan and the U.S. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 124-131.
Heine, S. J. (in press). An exploration of cultural variation in self-enhancing and self-improving motivations. Nebraska Symposium of Motivation.
Heine, S. J., Kitayama, S., Lehman, D. R., Takata, T., Ide, E., Leung, C., & Matsumoto, H. (2001). Divergent consequences of success and failure in Japan and North America: An investigation of self-improving motivations and malleable selves.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 599-615.
Heine, S. J., & Lehman, D. R. (1999). Culture, self-discrepancies, and self-satisfaction.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 915-925.
Heine, S. J., & Lehman, D. R. (in press). Move the body, change the self: Acculturative effects on the self-concept.  In M. Schaller & C. Crandall (Eds.), Psychological Foundations of Culture.
Heine, S. J., & Renshaw, K. (in press).  Interjudge agreement, self-enhancement, and liking: Cross-cultural divergences.  Personality and Social Psychological Bulletin.
Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94, 319-340.
Kanagawa, C., Cross, S. E., & Markus, H. R. (2001). “Who am I?”: The cultural psychology of the conceptual self.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 90-103.
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991).  Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253.
Suh, E. M. (2002). Culture, identity consistency, and subjective well-being.  Manuscript submitted for publication.  University of California, Irvine.