A great deal of previous research has found that North American and East
Asian culture differ in presenting themselves in front of other people.
Maintaining positive self view and describing themselves in more favorable terms
than others are said to be two of the most prominent self-enhancing
characteristics of the West. Standing on the other side of the pole, East Asian
people reach the goal of harmonious society by making the most of their humble,
self-effacing side of personality. Most recent research furthermore has also
provided a more elaborate explanation on self-presentation style in both
cultures. It is the way the East and the West view 'self' and 'other' that
influence them much on self-presenting. Eastern's propensity of high evaluation
of commonality with others has made the cultures rather subtle to the
distinction between self and others hence it is likely for people in the culture
to put more consideration to things related to other people.
The present study would like to focus on bicultural individuals who experienced
and internalized both Eastern and Western values and to investigate whether they
change their presentation style if they were to exposed to different situational
cues that were strongly linked to East Asian and North American cultures. It was
anticipated that American priming would produce a higher evaluation on 'self',
whereas Japanese priming would generate a higher evaluation on 'other'. The
measurement of these evaluations was conducted by using Self-Profitable
Other-Profitable (SPOP) Traits scaling which emphasized personality traits that
benefit only to self and to other people respectively.
In line with the above cross-cultural concept, Japanese priming did actually
produce a significant higher score on other-profitable traits but American
priming was rather the opposite. Bicultural participants in American condition
also evaluated OP higher than SP and the difference of scaling between the two
personality traits was the highest among all the group targets. This was
possibly related to the contrast effect and some potential limitations of the
research design. Since the present study only took samples in Japan, the strong
influence from the Japanese environment was inevitable. Finally, a more
elaborate design of priming is required to obtain a higher validity of result.