ABSTRAKIn a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Sedikides, Gaertner and Vevea (2005) presented two meta-analyses that include eight papers to investigate the question of whether people from Eastern cultures self-enchance more for traits that they view to be important compared to those that they view as unimportant. The results supported their hypotesis: Self-enchancement appears to be pancultural. However, this conclusion is severely compromised by six relevant papaers that are not included in their meta-analyses. Importantly, all of these six studies contradicted their hyphotesis. When complete meta-analyses are conducted which include all of the relevant papers, a very different pattern of results emerges. Eastern and Western cultures do not differ from each other in the pattern of their self-enchancement of independent and interdependent traits. Furthermore, whereas Westerners self-enchanced significantly more for traits that they viewed to be especially important, East Asians did not. Contrary to the Sedikides et al. (2005) suggestion, the existing evidence suggests substantial cross-cultural variation in self-enchancement, with Westeners being far more self-enchancing than Easterners. Reasons for the conflicting pattern of findings across methods and meta-analyses are discussed.
