How does the cultural construct of individualism-collectivism relate to global self-esteem? It is proposed that highly collectivist cultures promote the development of one dimension of global self-esteem (generalized self-liking) but challenge the development of the other (generalized self-competence), whereas highly individualist cultures are characterized by the inverse asymmetry. This cultural trade-off hypothesis was investigated by comparing a sample of 302 Chinese with a sample of 343 American college students. The cross-cultural equivalence of the two-dimensional model of self-esteem was first assessed and found to be adequate. Given the high intercorrelation of the 2 self-esteem dimensions, only the unique or non-common part of each dimension was used in hypothesis testing. As predicted, the Chinese were lower in self-competence but higher in self-liking than the Americans. Caveats and implications are discussed.
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