One explanation for the lower self-esteem of East Asians is that they have dialectical, or inconsistent, self-esteem in that they endorse both the positively and the negatively keyed items of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, relative to Euro-Americans. The following research extended this effect to implicit self-esteem. In two studies, Chinese, Euro-Americans (Studies 1 and 2), and Chinese Americans (Study 2) completed explicit and implicit measures of self-esteem. On both types of measures, Chinese scored most highly on various indices of dialectical self-esteem. In Study 2, the explicit self-esteem of Chinese Americans was similar to that of Chinese, but their implicit self-esteem was identical to that of Euro-Americans. In the discussion, we focus on how East Asians come to possess inconsistent self-esteem and pose questions for future research.
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