Aligning inside and outside perspectives of the self: A cross-cultural difference in self-perception

Past research shows that European Americans tend to take a first-person perspective to understand the self and are unlikely to align the inside look with the outside gaze, whereas Asians tend to take a third-person perspective and are likely to shift their inside look in the direction of the outsize gaze. In three experiments, we compared Asians and European Americans' self-perceptions when the presence of their parents in the background of self-perception was primed or otherwise. Without the priming, both European Americans and Asians viewed themselves more positively from their own perspective than from their parents' perspective. With the priming, only Asians lowered the positivity of their self-perceptions to match the perceived positivity of the self in the parents' perspective. These results suggest that Asians do not have a static, passive tendency to assimilate their self-views into the perceived external assessments of the self. Rather, their self-views are fluid and flexible.