The Relationship Between Explicit/implicit Self-enhancement And Self-esteem

Self-enhancement is a hot issue in the field of self study, but as a culturally constructed motive, it is a provocative argument, although the research in this field have become increasingly deep and have expanded, so far there is no consistent conclusion yet. Whether self-enhancement is universal or not? Or as some researchers advocate that self-enhancement exists only in individualism culture? There are many studies about Pancultural self-enhancement, but most of these studies choose American and Japanese as subjects, Although Japan is a collectivist country, regarding Japanese as representative of collectivist culture seems to be inappropriate. China is the typical representative of collectivist culture, but self-enhancement of cross-cultural research lack study about Chinese people’s self-enhancement. Although there have been some researchers begun to pay attention to self-enhancement of Chinese people in recent years, however, there is also no consistent conclusion about whether the Chinese people self-enhance or not, then whether Chinese people self-enhance or not? According to the inherent characteristics of Chinese culture, Zuo and Zhang (2006) propose that Chinese people will self-enhance, as Chinese people pay more attention to interpersonal relationship, they value the concept of face, so Chinese people’s self-enhancement may be interpersonal and covert. Although Zhang (2006) validated on the interpersonal relation self-enhancement of Chinese people, he didn’t validate on the implicit self-enhancement about Chinese people, so whether interpersonal characteristics and covert characteristics are the characteristics of Chinese’s people self-enhancement? In view of this, some researchers have started to study from the aspect of interpersonal relation and ability about Chinese people’s self-enhancement, and further explore the relationship between self-enhancement and self-esteem which is link to mental health, but most of these studies belong to the explicit level, considering individual’s self-enhancement in collectivist culture may be covert, so it seems to be more meaningful to explore Chinese people’s self-enhancement from the the implicit level. In consideration of the problems above, this article investigated Chinese people’s self-enhancement and the relationship between self-enhancement and self-esteem through three empirical studies. Chose college students as subjects, developed an explicit self-enhancement questionnaire of the college students with better than the average effect, basing on the two aspects:interpersonal relation and ability, so the questionnaire include interpersonal traits and ability traits. In study1, I inspected self-enhancement of college students from both explicit and implicit aspects, using explicit self-enhancement questionnaire and the implicit association test to measure self-enhancement respectively, using words which are the same as words of explicit self-enhancement questionnaire as attribute words of implicit association test, developed two implicit test, the implicit ability self-enhancement and implicit interpersonal relation self-enhancement. I added the self-esteem scale into study2to explore the relationship between explicit/implicit self-enhancement and self-esteem by measuring college students’ self-enhancement and self-esteem. In study3, I set up two types of situations:situation of self-esteem was threatened and situation of self-esteem was not threatened to explore different levels of people in self-esteem’self-enhancement in the two different situations. Through three studies about self-enhancement above, Major conclusions are as follows:(1) College students not only show the inclination of explicit self-enhancement, but also have implicit self-enhancement, including two aspects:interpersonal relation self-enhancement and ability self-enhancement.(2) There is no gender difference in explicit/implicit self-enhancement from both the interpersonal relation self-enhancement and ability self-enhancement.(3) Explicit self-enhancement and implicit self-enhancement are independent of each other based on the interpersonal relation enhancement and ability self-enhancement.(4) The relationship between explicit/implicit self-enhancement and self-esteem are different, explicit ability self-enhancement shows positive correlation with self-esteem, explicit interpersonal relation self-enhancement shows no correlation with self-esteem, both implicit ability self-enhancement and implicit interpersonal relation self-enhancement shows no correlation with self-esteem.(5) The degree of separation between implicit and explicit ability self-enhancement is negatively correlates with self-esteem while the degree of separation between implicit and explicit interpersonal relation self-enhancement isn’t significantly correlate with self-esteem.(6) In different situations, different levels of people in self-esteem performance differently on explicit self-enhancement. When self-esteem is threatened, high self-esteem subjects (HSE) adopt the strategy of compensatory self-enhancement, low self-esteem subjects (LSE) don’t adopt the strategy of compensatory self-enhancement. HSE have more interpersonal relation self-enhancement when self-esteem is threatened than self-esteem is not threatened, while there is no significant difference about ability self-enhancement in two situations for them, LSE have more interpersonal self-enhancement when self-esteem is not threatened than self-esteem is threatened, while there is no significant difference about ability self-enhancement in two situations for them.(7) In different situations, different levels of people in self-esteem have no difference in implicit self-enhancement, and people’s implicit self-enhancement did not change significantly in the two situations.