"Who am I?" - The cultural psychology of the conceptual self

This study investigated whether self-concepts that arise from participation in interdependent cultural contexts, in this case the self-concepts of Jap anese students, will be relatively more sensitive to situational variation than will self-concepts that arise in independent cultural contexts, in thi s case the self-concepts of U.S. college students. The self-concepts of 128 Japanese and 133 U.S. women were assessed in one of four distinct social s ituations: in a group, with a faculty member with a peer and alone in a res earch booth. Furthermore, the authors examined the hypothesis that Japanese self-concepts would differ from American self-concepts in valence, reflect ing normative and desirable tendencies toward self-criticism. American and Japanese participants differed in the content, number, and range of self-de scriptions . As predicted, the situation had a greater influence on the sel f-descriptions of the Japanese participants than on the Americans' self-des criptions, and the self-descriptions of the Japanese were more negative.