Understanding Western‐East Asian Differences and Similarities in Self‐Enhancement

I present a roughly historical overview of the literature bearing on the universality of the self‐enhancement motive, which I define as the need to cultivate and maintain a positive self‐view. There is considerable evidence indicating that people from prototypically Western cultures demonstrate a strong need to self‐enhance, which manifests itself in a number of tendencies involving attending to and elaborating upon positive self‐relevant information at the expense of negative information. Recently, a lively debate about the universality of the self‐enhancement motive emerged, with some researchers arguing that the motive itself is culture‐specific and others contending that the motive is universal but that culture places important constraints on how it is expressed. I provide a review and synthesis of the existing evidence and conclude by discussing research on dialectical self‐esteem, which offers another perspective on how culture shapes the expression of self‐evaluative processes.