An experimental study on Japanese self-effacing tendencies : A stringent test on the possibility of self-presentation

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An experiment was conducted to probe the hidden self-evaluations among Japanese students. For this purpose, the bogus-pipeline technique developed in attitude measurement was used. In this technique, an experimenter allegedly measures a participant's real attitude by a physiological device. It was expected that participants would express their genuine self-evaluations with this procedure. In this experiment, participants in the bogus-pipeline condition were told to predict the results of the measurement by the device, whereas participants in the control condition were just instructed to answer their self-evaluations. Self-evaluations were made on two types of traits : self-profitable (SP) traits and other-profitable (OP) traits. The results revealed that the participants in the bogus-pipeline condition expressed higher self-evaluation on the SP traits and lower self-evaluation on the OP traits, compared with those in the control condition. This result indicates that the participants did not express their genuine self-evaluations when they were just asked to express their self-evaluations. We conducted another study to examine Japanese reluctance to express their genuine self-evaluations. Specifically, we examined how Japanese would perceive others who either self-enhance on SP traits or OP traits. The result indicated that Japanese did not like those who self-enhance on SP traits compared with those who self-enhance on OP traits, supporting our arguments. It can be concluded that Japanese tend to hide their high self-evaluation on their SP traits to generate favorable impression among others.