Culture and self-perception in Japan and the United States.

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Abstract
I examined the influence of cultural meaning systems on the perception of self among Japanese and American (United States) college students. Given the importance of social context to the Japanese self as compared with the U.S. self, I used two types of free-response format: the noncontextualized Twenty Statements Test (TST), and a contextualized questionnaire asking subjects to describe themselves in various situations. Consistent with prior research, on the TST, Japanese subjects listed fewer abstract, psychological attributes than did American subjects, referring more to social role and behavioral context. On the contextualized format, however, this trend was reversed. Japanese scored higher on abstract, psychological attributes than did Americans, who tended to qualify their self-descriptions. In addition, on the TST, Japanese surpassed Americans in the number of highly abstract, global self-references. Results point to the impact of divergent cultural conceptions of the person rather than differences in cognitive ability on the perception of self in these two cultures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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