This research project extends the conceptual and methodological tools of the Social Relations Model (SRM) to a long-standing debate in cultural psychology: Do Asian-Americans fail to show the self-enhancement bias that Westerners often show and instead show a more negative self-effacement bias? In particular, the Fellow will adapt Kwan and colleagues? recent model of self-enhancement bias which emphasizes that two factors need to be considered to accurately estimate an individual?s self-enhancement (or effacement) bias. That is, self-perceptions must be compared both to how an individual perceives people in general (i.e., perceiver effect) and how others consensually perceive the behavior of the target individual (i.e., target effect). The Postdoctoral Fellow will extend this SRM-based approach to cultural research by including both in-group and out-group perceptions. She will be able to examine three kinds of differences between Asian and European Americans within one comprehensive design: perceiver effects (e.g., do Asians generally perceive people more critically or negatively? Do Asians only perceive other Asians more critically?), target effects (e.g., do Asians score lower in certain desirable social characteristics?), and various aspects of self-enhancement bias (e.g., do Asians perceive themselves in self-enhancing or self-effacing ways? Do biased self-perceptions affect adjustment in a positive or negative way?). She will compare conclusions derived from the two earlier conceptions of self-enhancement (namely the social comparison and the self-insight perspective) and then test whether Asian self-perceptions are realistic, self-enhancing, or self-effacing. Finally, the Fellow will study the academic and social consequences of self-perception biases in college students of different ethnic backgrounds. To test these hypotheses, the Fellow will use a repeated-measures design in which participants rate their own behavior and the behavior of the other group members in a specific group interaction context. In a round-robin design, Asian and European American participants (assigned to 6-person groups) will provide ratings of self and others on several positively and negatively-valenced behavioral attributes, as well as social adjustment variables such as liking and interpersonal closeness. Furthermore, the mixed ingroup-outgroup feature of my design will allow the Fellow to also compute the perceiver, target, and self-enhancement effects specifically for one?s own ethnic in-group (e.g., Asians perceptions of other Asians) or an ethnic out-group. This research should provide a more complete and contextually nuanced understanding of how social perception and self-enhancement biases differ across Asian-Americans and other ethnic groups in the U.S. For example, this research importantly extends previous work by controlling for individual differences in both perceiver and target effects, thus beginning to resolve the inconsistent findings about self-enhancement for Asian and European Americans, as well as examining if there are personal or social consequences of this bias. Additionally, this research emphasizes the importance of the cultural context?conclusions about self-enhancement may critically depend on social comparison standards (e.g., comparing the self to an out-group or one?s ethnic in-group). In the future, the Fellow plans to conduct research that takes a cultural approach to studying social perception by examining how other factors such as ethnic identity strength, biculturalism, and acculturation shape self-perception processes. Specifically, she hopes to extend this work to other underrepresented populations including African Americans and Latinos. This proposal for postdoctoral training and research stems from earlier research that she conducted at UC-Berkeley, which has been funded initially by a NSF Pre-doctoral fellowship and a Ford Foundation Dissertation-Year fellowship. The Fellow looks forward to involving future generations of undergraduate and graduate students in research on minority and diversity issues and generating methodologically sound research on these topics.
All of my research projects aim to incorporate an understanding of cultural differences across several cultural groups to understand how individuals see themselves, see others, and navigate their social environments. In one line of research, I have examined the potential academic and social outcomes of self-perception biases and how they may differ across ethnic groups (Asians and Latinos). For example, Asian American and Latino undergraduate students participated in an interview where they discussed their perceptions of their parents’ expectations, how supportive they felt their parents were with their choice of major and school performance, and their feelings about their own academic performance. Latino students who saw their parents as having high academic expectations also perceived them as more supportive (See Figure 1). In contrast, Asian students perceived their parents’ academic expectations as stricter and were more critical of their own performance as a result. Asian students expected their parents to be more upset if they were to earn a C, saw them as less supportive, and felt less satisfied with their academic performance (See Figure 2). These findings suggest that cultural differences in parental expectations and they have divergent consequences for satisfaction with academic achievement and parental support: high parental expectations impose critical evaluation of performance among Asian students while they foster more parental support among Latino students. In a second line of research, I have examined how cultural primes affect Mexican American biculturals’ cognitive construal of cultural events and perceptions of their ethnic identity. Preliminary results suggest that Mexican American biculturals who see their two identities as conflicting respond to cultural primes in a contradictory manner (e.g., if you prime them with Mexican symbols, they are more likely to interpret social events in a typical American fashion). In a related study, I also examined the role of (Mexican and US) cultural identity and political orientation (Liberal vs. Conservative) in predicting cultural conflict, acculturation strategies/ideologies, and acculturative stress in US-born Mexican-Americans. Preliminary results suggest that Mexican Americans with strong US identification and weak Mexican identification experience the highest levels of cultural conflict. The political orientation of Mexican Americans also predicts their dominant acculturation strategy: more conservative Mexican Americans are more likely to use assimilationist strategies while more liberal Mexican Americans are more likely to use integration strategies.
