Do people want to be flattered or understood? The cross-cultural universality of self-verification

Researchers have recently debated the cultural generalizability of the motive to promote positive, self-enhancing beliefs about the self. Here we broaden the debate to include the generalizability of the self-verification motive, which encourages people to confirm their self-views, whether negative or positive. In two studies, participants from individualist and collectivist cultures rated the accuracy of positive vs. negative evaluations. Support for positivity strivings emerged in that participants from collectivist cultures (India and Taiwan) imputed more accuracy to positive than negative evaluations; participants from an individualist culture (U.S.A.) displayed positivity strivings in Experiment 2 only. These positivity strivings, however, were qualified by participantsʹ own self-views. In both collectivist and individualist cultures, the tendency to embrace positive evaluations was most pronounced among participants with positive self-views; indeed, in Experiment 1, participants with negative self-views rated negative evaluations as more accurate than positive evaluations. Such findings support the universality of self-verification strivings and underscore the importance of measuring self-views when attempting to identify basic self-motives.