This study examined the relationships between self-construal and verbal promotion. U.S. American college students (N = 196) completed Kim and Leung's (1997) self-construal scale. Forty-three students with extreme scores on the scale's two dimensions of independence and interdependence subsequently participated in a brief phone interview for the possibility of receiving an award of recognition and money. Participants' interview responses were content coded for the amount of self-promotion (extolling one's own attributes) and others-promotion (extolling significant others' contributions to self-success). Self-promotion was positively associated with an independent self-construal but negatively related to an interdependent self-construal. Others-promotion was positively associated with an interdependent self-construal but negatively related to an independent self-construal. The results highlight the importance of self-construal in predicting verbal promotion.
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