Cross-Cultural Differences in the Self Concept

Twenty-six Malaysian (Collectivist), 32 Australian, and 20 British (Individualist) subjects completed ten statements beginning with "I am." The responses were coded according to whether they were idiocentric, group, or allocentric self-references. The scores were then weighted according to the rank order in which they appeared on the questionnaire. As predicted by Hofstede's model, people from the collectivist culture produced significantly more group and fewer idiocentric self-descriptions than did people from the individualist cultures. The data support a pan-cultural model of the self in which cross-cultural variations in the self-concept are not treated as categorically different, but as reflecting the relative salience of the self's constituent components.