A comparison between self-competence and self-liking: Effects of individualism-collectivism cultural priming and sense of achievement

Abstract

Objectives. The study examined the cultural differences in two-dimensional global self-esteem (self-competence and self-liking) among a bicultural Hong Kong sample by adopting a cultural priming method. The influence of a sense of achievement on the relationship between culture orientation and two-dimensional self-esteem was also investigated. Methods. Bicultural college students from universities in Hong Kong completed two sets of questionnaires that distinguished between high and low sense of achievement among participants, and accessed their level of self-competence and self-liking under different manipulated conditions, respectively. In particular, the first set of questionnaire consisted of two parts: (1) screening task for sense of achievement; and (2) demographic information. The second set of questionnaire consisted of three parts: (1) culture primes; (2) manipulation check of cultural priming; and (3) measure of self-competence and self-liking. Results. IND-primed participants were found to possess higher level of self-competence when compared with COL-primed participants, whereas COL-primed participants were found to possess higher level of self-liking when compared with IND-primed participants. The self-competence ranking among four conditions was as follow: IND-primed high achiever> COL-primed high achiever > IND-primed low achiever > COL-primed low achiever, and the discrepancy among participants with low sense of achievement were greater than that among participants with high sense of achievement. The results showed trends in the direction predicted by the hypotheses, but none of the predicted differences were statistically significant. Discussion. The present study provided evidence for the direction of cultural explanations on the two-dimensional self-esteem. Besides, the self-competence ranking among four conditions and the discrepancy among participants with low sense of achievement and among participants with high sense of achievement might reveal the difference of attribution styles among various cultural orientations and the effect of self-serving attribution style.