The Effects Of Self-construal Priming And Its Influence On Self-enhancement

The research about self-enhancement and self-construal are the key points in psychological study during the recent years. Self-enhancement is a kind of motivation which individual evaluates himself better in order to obtain positive feedback. Self-construal refers to the extent to which the individual contacts or distinguishes himself with others. Self-construal mainly includes two dimensions, independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal. The difference of the focus and strength related to self-enhancement, according to the foreign scholars, precisely shows the cultural differences between western individualism and eastern collectivism. And such differences, which correspond to personality dimension, are the independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal. The previous study has showed that these two self-construals can coexist in one body. And they can change in accordance with the present situation, which is the foundation of cultural priming study in self-construal. There is no consistent result of research on whether Chinese have the self-enhancement. Nowadays, in the multi-cultural society, with the development of the economic and cultural communication between eastern and western countries, what are its characteristics in self-enhancement of the undergraduates in China? This is the main content of Study2. And Study3, which is based on Study1and Study2, did research on the college students’self-enhancement through priming both the individuals’independent construal and interdependent construal. The main results are as follows:(1)Under different priming conditions, the characteristics of college students’self-construal has changed. And compared with the collectivism culture priming, the individual culture priming plays a more important part. First of all, there are significant differences in the dimension of independent self-construal under different cultural priming conditions. The score of independent scale of the group of individualism is significantly higher than the group of both collectivism and the control group, especially in the individualism and behavioral consis; and there is no significant difference between the control group and the collectivism culture priming group. Second, there are not significant differences in the dimension of interdependent self-construal under different cultural priming conditions. Though the score of interdependent self-construal in the collectivism culture priming group is the highest, there is no remarkable difference among the three groups.(2)The university students present the characteristics of self-enhancement in general, which shows that self-enhancement is a kind of prevailing motivation. There are significant differences of college students’ self-enhancement in the birth origin, but no differences in either gender or educational background. And the rural students have higher self-enhancement than that of the urban students.(3)The self-enhancement of university students shows some changes under different culture priming conditions. The score of independent self-construal priming group is obviously higher than that of both the interdependent self-construal group and the control group. This proves the existence of the cultural frame switching effect. There are significant differences in the favorable and individual dimensions between the independent self-construal group and the interdependent self-construal group, but no significant differences in the unfavorable and collective dimensions.