According to the cultural trade-off hypothesis, individualism and collectivism entail inverse costs and benefits for the two dimensions of global self-esteem. Specifically, individualism is described as promoting the development of self-competence but inhibiting the development of self-liking. Collectivism is described as doing the opposite. To examine the hypothesis, Malaysian (collectivist) and British (individualist) students were compared on their self-liking and self-competence. Consistent with predictions, Malaysians were significantly lower in self-competence when self-liking was held constant but were higher in self-liking when self-competence was held constant. The differences, however, were not reliable after statistically equating the cultural groups on two derived dimensions of individualism-collectivism—deference to the direction of relatives and connectedness to parents—suggesting that these dimensions might account for the trade-off in self-esteem.
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