Know Thyself: The Impact of Cultural Frame Switching On Bicultural Individuals’ Self-Construal Perceptions

Authors:

Abstract: Self-awareness is essential for individuals to understand how they present themselves when negotiating, managing conflicts, and generally interacting with others. Self-awareness development is often facilitated via the use of assessments, and one assessment topic of continued importance is self-construal – especially for bicultural individuals. The present study examines whether cultural frame switching effects can be caused by elements found within assessment contexts, and in turn affect biculturals’ self-construal scores. The moderating role of bicultural identity integration (BII) is also explored. East Asian immigrants in the United States were presented with various assessment-related cues which were either more Asian or more American in their cultural content, and then completed a comprehensive self-construal measure. Results showed that cultural framing and BII interacted to influence participants’ endorsement of independent self-construal. The findings highlight the need to more carefully consider the interplay between contextual cues and biculturals’ multifaceted cultural selves when interpreting their assessment outcomes.

Track: CULTGEN

Keywords: Self-construal, Cultural frame switching, Bicultural identity integration