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Culture and Implicit Self-Esteem

Chinese Are "Good" and "Bad" at the Same Time

Bates College, hboucher{at}bates.edu

Kaiping Peng

University of California, Berkeley

Junqi Shi

Peking University

Lei Wang

Peking University

One explanation for the lower self-esteem of East Asians is that they have dialectical, or inconsistent, self-esteem in that they endorse both the positively and the negatively keyed items of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, relative to Euro-Americans. The following research extended this effect to implicit self-esteem. In two studies, Chinese, Euro-Americans (Studies 1 and 2), and Chinese Americans (Study 2) completed explicit and implicit measures of self-esteem. On both types of measures, Chinese scored most highly on various indices of dialectical self-esteem. In Study 2, the explicit self-esteem of Chinese Americans was similar to that of Chinese, but their implicit self-esteem was identical to that of Euro-Americans. In the discussion, we focus on how East Asians come to possess inconsistent self-esteem and pose questions for future research.

Key Words: cross-cultural differences • East Asians • self-esteem • Implicit Association Test • Go/No-Go Association Task

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 1, 24-45 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0022022108326195


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