INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES Pancultural Self-Enhancement Constantine Sedikides University of Southampton Lowell Gaertner University of Tennessee Yoshiyasu Toguchi Kansai University The culture movement challenged the universality of the self-enhancement motive by proposing that the motive is pervasive in individualistic cultures (the West) but absent in collectivistic cultures (the East). The present research posited that Westerners and Easterners use different tactics to achieve the same goal: positive self-regard. Study 1 tested participants from differing cultural backgrounds (the United States vs. Japan), and Study 2 tested participants of differing self-construals (independent vs. interdependent). Americans and independents self-enhanced on individualistic attributes, whereas Japanese and interde- pendents self-enhanced on collectivistic attributes. Independents regarded individualistic attributes, whereas interdependents regarded collectivistic attributes, as personally important. Attribute importance mediated self-enhancement. Regardless of cultural background or self-construal, people self-enhance on personally important dimensions. Self-enhancement is a universal human motive. It is a mistake to consider the processes in social psychology as basic in the natural science sense. Rather, they may largely be considered the psychological counterpart of cultural norms. (Gergen, 1973, p. 318). One of the necessary conditions for the formulation of universal theories and laws, whether in the natural or social sciences, is that they be phrased in sufficiently abstract form as to allow for the insertion of specific objects, cases, places, events, and times as variables. (Schlen- ker, 1974, p. 2) In his classic article “Social Psychology as History,” Gergen (1973) criticized the field of social psychology for its failure to appreciate that human behavior is situated in cultural (and histor- ical) norms. At approximately the same time, Tajfel’s (1972) “Experiments in a Vacuum” bemoaned social psychology’s inat- tention to contextual (including cultural) influences on behavior. Similar lamentations have since been registered by other scholars, such as Billig (1987), Geertz (1973), Harre (1986), Sampson (1977), Shweder (1984), and Weisz, Rothbaum, and Blackburn (1984), all of whom have highlighted the relevance of culture for social behavior and the self. The culture movement, however, did not catch on in the 1970s and 1980s. Why was the social–psychological mainstream seem- ingly so resistant to this chorus of critical appraisals and alternative proposals? One reason is the well-entrenched intellectual tradition of Newtonian physics and British empiricism (Kashima, 2000; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). This tradition advo- cates a model of scientific inquiry in which universal causal laws are axiomatized, logico-mathematical inferences are deduced, em- pirical hypotheses are derived, and the hypotheses are tested through experimentation, with the results either confirming or disconfirming the hypotheses. However, additional reasons are also worth considering; these have to do with the inherent weak- nesses of these critical appraisals and counterproposals. The early culture movement was largely viewed as lacking theoretical co- herence, methodological rigor, and heuristic value. The perception was that the movement (a) did not define or operationalize the construct culture in a compelling manner, (b) focused mostly on comparisons between countries rather than cultures, (c) selected comparison countries out of research convenience rather than a guiding theory, (d) was descriptive rather than generative, and (e) failed to lead to a substantial accumulation of knowledge—partly because of its overreliance on the social constructionist or post- Constantine Sedikides, Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, England; Lowell Gaertner, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee; Yoshiyasu Toguchi, Department of Psychology, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan. Yoshiyasu Toguchi’s honors thesis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (supervised by Constantine Sedikides) provided the impetus for the reported research. We thank Gabriel Azoulay, Lori Gear, James Ono, and Sandra Saathoff for assistance with data collection; Steve Heine for stimulating conversations and suggestions as well as the generous provision of his in-press and unpublished work; and Mark Dechesne, Aiden Gregg, Michelle Neiss, and Tim Wildschut for constructive comments on drafts of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Constantine Sedikides, Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, High- field Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ, England. E-mail: cs2@soton.ac.uk Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, Vol. 84, No. 1, 60 –79 Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.84.1.60 60