This assignment has two parts, the first part will require an exploration of the

Social Psychology Network

and the second part will require an examination of the research.
Part 1:
Choose one study from the Social Psychology Network website.
To access the online research:

1. Look under the header on the left side of the page labeled “Social Psychology Pages.”

2. Click on the link labeled “Online Psychology Studies”

3. Participate in a study

In 1,250 words, review research related to the topic area of the study chosen (some articles can be found in the Social Psychology Network site, others will require outside research). Identify the type of research (survey, experiment, etc.) used with the study and evaluate the appropriateness of that methodology. Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as a means of collecting data in psychological research. Elaborate on any potential confounds or ethical concerns noted while participating in the study.
Use three to five scholarly sources in addition to the social psychology website, your textbook can be used as one of the resources.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. Refer to the

LopesWrite Technical Support articles

for assistance.

Benchmark Information

Reading Reference:

1. Review the Social Psychology Network website.

URL:

http://www.socialpsychology.org/

Read “Social Psychology” by Turner from Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology. (2006).

URL:

https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/cupsoc/social_psychology/0

Rubic_Print_

Format

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Format

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Course Code	Class Code	Assignment Title	Total Points
PSY-530	PSY-530-O500	Benchmark – Social Psychology	95.0
Criteria	Percentage	Unsatisfactory (0.00%)	Less than Satisfactory (74.00%)	Satisfactory (79.00%)	Good (87.00%)	Excellent (100.00%)	Comments	Points Earned
Content	70.0%
Identify the type of research used in a chosen study, including an evaluation of the appropriate use of the methodology.		2			5.0%	Identification of the type of research used in a chosen study, including an evaluation of the appropriate use of the methodology is missing.	Identification of the type of research used in a chosen study, including an evaluation of the appropriate use of the methodology is vague and inconsistent.	Identification of the type of research used in a chosen study, including an evaluation of the appropriate use of the methodology is present and appropriate.	Identification of the type of research used in a chosen study, including an evaluation of the appropriate use of the methodology is present, clear, and makes some connections to research.	Identification of the type of research used in a chosen study, including an evaluation of the appropriate use of the methodology is clear, concise, and makes connections to current research.
Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research (Comp 2.1)	Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research is missing.	Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research is vague and inconsistent.	Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research is present and appropriate.	Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research is present, clear, and makes some connections to research.	Summarization of the advantages and disadvantages of using an Internet site as means of collecting data for psychological research is clear, concise, and makes connections to current research.
Elaborate on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study		20.0%	Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is missing.	Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is vague and inconsistent.	Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is present and appropriate.	Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is present, clear, and makes some connection to research.	Elaboration on any potential confounds or ethical concerns while participating in the psychological study is clear, concise, and makes connections to current research.
Organization and Effectiveness
Thesis Development and Purpose	7.0%	Paper lacks any discernible overall purpose or organizing claim.	Thesis and/or main claim are insufficiently developed and/or vague; purpose is not clear.	Thesis and/or main claim are apparent and appropriate to purpose.	Thesis and/or main claim are clear and forecast the development of the paper. It is descriptive and reflective of the arguments and appropriate to the purpose.	Thesis and/or main claim are comprehensive. The essence of the paper is contained within the thesis. Thesis statement makes the purpose of the paper clear.
Argument Logic and Construction	8.0%	Statement of purpose is not justified by the conclusion. The conclusion does not support the claim made. Argument is incoherent and uses noncredible sources.	Sufficient justification of claims is lacking. Argument lacks consistent unity. There are obvious flaws in the logic. Some sources have questionable credibility.	Argument is orderly, but may have a few inconsistencies. The argument presents minimal justification of claims. Argument logically, but not thoroughly, supports the purpose. Sources used are credible. Introduction and conclusion bracket the thesis.	Argument shows logical progressions. Techniques of argumentation are evident. There is a smooth progression of claims from introduction to conclusion. Most sources are authoritative.	Clear and convincing argument that presents a persuasive claim in a distinctive and compelling manner. All sources are authoritative.
Mechanics of Writing (includes spelling, punctuation, grammar, language use)	Surface errors are pervasive enough that they impede communication of meaning. Inappropriate word choice and/or sentence construction are used.	Frequent and repetitive mechanical errors distract the reader. Inconsistencies in language choice (register), sentence structure, and/or word choice are present.	Some mechanical errors or typos are present, but are not overly distracting to the reader. Correct sentence structure and audience-appropriate language are used.	Prose is largely free of mechanical errors, although a few may be present. A variety of sentence structures and effective figures of speech are used.	Writer is clearly in command of standard, written, academic English.
10.0%
Paper Format (use of appropriate style for the major and assignment)	Template is not used appropriately or documentation format is rarely followed correctly.	Appropriate template is used, but some elements are missing or mistaken. A lack of control with formatting is apparent.	Appropriate template is used. Formatting is correct, although some minor errors may be present.	Appropriate template is fully used. There are virtually no errors in formatting style.	All format elements are correct.
Documentation of Sources (citations, footnotes, references, bibliography, etc., as appropriate to assignment and style)	Sources are not documented.	Documentation of sources is inconsistent or incorrect, as appropriate to assignment and style, with numerous formatting errors.	Sources are documented, as appropriate to assignment and style, although some formatting errors may be present.	Sources are documented, as appropriate to assignment and style, and format is mostly correct.	Sources are completely and correctly documented, as appropriate to assignment and style, and format is free of error.
Total Weightage	100%

Culture and the Distinctiveness Motive: Constructing Identity in
Individualistic and Collectivistic Contexts

Maja Becker, Vivian L. Vignoles, Ellinor Owe,
Rupert Brown, Peter B. Smith, and Matt Easterbrook

University of Sussex

Ginette Herman and Isabelle de Sauvage
Université Catholique de Louvain

David Bourguignon
Paul Verlaine University–Metz

Ana Torres and Leoncio Camino
Federal University of Paraı́ba

Flávia Cristina Silveira Lemos
Federal University of Pará

M. Cristina Ferreira
Salgado de Oliveira University

Silvia H. Koller
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Roberto González, Diego Carrasco,
Maria Paz Cadena, and Siugmin Lay

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Qian Wang
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Michael Harris Bond
Polytechnic University of Hong Kong

Elvia Vargas Trujillo and Paola Balanta
Universidad de Los Andes

Aune Valk
Estonian Literary Museum

Kassahun Habtamu Mekonnen
University of Addis Ababa

George Nizharadze
Free University of Tbilisi

Marta Fülöp
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Camillo Regalia, Claudia Manzi, and
Maria Brambilla

Catholic University of Milan

Charles Harb
American University of Beirut

Said Aldhafri
Sultan Qaboos University

Mariana Martin
University of Namibia

Ma. Elizabeth J. Macapagal
Ateneo de Manila University

Aneta Chybicka
University of Gdańsk

Alin Gavreliuc
West University of Timisoara

Johanna Buitendach
University of KwaZulu Natal

Inge Schweiger Gallo
Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Emre Özgen, Ülkü E. Güner, and Nil Yamakoğlu
Bilkent University

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those
socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18
nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate
the ways in which people achieve feelings of distinctiveness, rather than influence the strength of their

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association
2012, Vol. 102, No. 4, 833– 855 0022-3514/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0026853

833

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motivation to do so. We measured the distinctiveness motive using an indirect technique to avoid cultural
response biases. Analyses showed that the distinctiveness motive was not weaker—and, if anything, was
stronger—in more collectivistic nations. However, individualism– collectivism was found to moderate
the ways in which feelings of distinctiveness were constructed: Distinctiveness was associated more
closely with difference and separateness in more individualistic cultures and was associated more closely
with social position in more collectivistic cultures. Multilevel analysis confirmed that it is the prevailing
beliefs and values in an individual’s context, rather than the individual’s own beliefs and values, that
account for these differences.

Keywords: identity, motivation, culture, distinctiveness, self-concept

A common view in personality and social psychology is that
people strive to distinguish themselves from others and that they
have a basic motive to achieve distinctiveness. However, this view
has been challenged in cross-cultural psychology, where it is
sometimes asserted that the strength of this motive varies by
culture. In some cultures, it is claimed, people want to be distin-
guished as individuals, whereas in others, people want to be part of
larger entities and may even seek to avoid distinctiveness from
other members of those entities (Triandis, 1995; see also Kim &
Markus, 1999; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Nevertheless, until
now this assertion has not been tested appropriately. In this article,
we examine whether and how the motive for distinctiveness may
be moderated by culture.

Distinctiveness as a Core Psychological Motive

The concept of distinctiveness plays a central role in several
social psychological theories of self and identity processes. For

example, uniqueness theory (Snyder & Fromkin, 1980) posits that
people need to see themselves as unique and different from others
in the interpersonal domain. In intergroup contexts, social identity
theory proposes that people’s actions can often be understood as
attempts to maintain or restore distinctiveness for their ingroup in
relation to some outgroup(s) (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Brewer’s
(1991) optimal distinctiveness theory suggests that competing
needs for inclusion and distinctiveness underlie people’s choices
of, and satisfaction with, group memberships: People prefer groups
that are neither so large as to threaten people’s need to be distinct
nor so small as to frustrate their need to feel included.

Reflecting the commonality among these theories, the need for
distinctiveness is conceptualized here as an identity motive. Moti-
vated identity construction theory (MICT; Vignoles, 2011; Vi-
gnoles, Regalia, Manzi, Golledge, & Scabini, 2006) is based on the
idea that identity is constructed through a complex interplay of
cognitive, affective, and social interaction processes, all of which

This article was published Online First January 30, 2012.
Maja Becker, Vivian L. Vignoles, Ellinor Owe, Rupert Brown, Peter B.

Smith, and Matt Easterbrook, School of Psychology, University of Sussex,
Brighton, United Kingdom; Ginette Herman and Isabelle de Sauvage,
Unité de psychologie sociale et des organisations, Université Catholique de
Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; David Bourguignon, Laboratoire
INTERPSY-ETIC, Paul Verlaine University–Metz, Metz, France; Ana
Torres and Leoncio Camino, Department of Psychology, Federal Univer-
sity of Paraı́ba, João Pessoa, Paraı́ba, Brazil; Flávia Cristina Silveira
Lemos, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Pará, Belém,
Pará, Brazil; M. Cristina Ferreira, Department of Psychology, Salgado de
Oliveira University, Sao Goncalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Silvia H. Koller,
Department of Psychology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto
Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; Roberto González, Diego Carrasco,
Maria Paz Cadena, and Siugmin Lay, School of Psychology, Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Qian Wang, Department of
Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Special
Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China; Michael Harris
Bond, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Polytechnic University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of the People’s
Republic of China; Elvia Vargas Trujillo and Paola Balanta, Department of
Psychology, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia; Aune Valk,
Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia; Kassahun Habtamu Mekonnen,
Department of Psychology, University of Addis Ababa, Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia; George Nizharadze, Department of Social Sciences, Free Uni-
versity of Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia; Marta Fülöp, Institute for Psychology,
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary; Camillo Regalia,
Claudia Manzi, and Maria Brambilla, Centre for Family Studies and
Research, Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy; Charles Harb, De-

partment of Social and Behavioral Sciences, American University of Bei-
rut, Beirut, Lebanon; Said Aldhafri, Department of Psychology, Sultan
Qaboos University, Al Khoudh, Muscat, Oman; Mariana Martin, Depart-
ment of Human Sciences, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia; Ma.
Elizabeth J. Macapagal, Department of Psychology, Ateneo de Manila
University, Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines; Aneta Chybicka,
Department of Cross-Cultural Psychology, University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk,
Poland; Alin Gavreliuc, Department of Psychology, West University of
Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania; Johanna Buitendach, School of Psychol-
ogy, University of KwaZulu Natal, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa; Inge
Schweiger Gallo, Department of Social Psychology, Universidad Com-
plutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Emre Özgen, Ülkü E. Güner, and Nil
Yamakoğlu, Department of Psychology, Bilkent University, Ankara,
Turkey.

Preliminary analyses have been presented at the 4th African Region
Conference of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology
(IACCP), Cameroon, Central Africa, 2009; the 20th Congress of the
IACCP, Australia, 2010; the British Psychological Society Social Psychol-
ogy Conference, Winchester, United Kingdom, 2010; and the Society for
Personality and Social Psychology Conference, San Antonio, Texas, 2011.
This work was funded by Economic and Social Research Council (United
Kingdom) Grant RES-062-23-1300 to Vivian L. Vignoles and Rupert
Brown.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Maja
Becker, who is now at the CLLE (CNRS, UTM, EPHE), “Cognition,
Langues, Langage et Ergonomie,” Maison de la recherche, 5 allées A.
Machado, 31058 Toulouse Cedex 9, France. E-mail: mbecker@univ-
tlse2.fr

834 BECKER ET AL.

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occur within particular cultural and local meaning systems. These
processes are understood to be guided by particular motives or
“tendencies toward certain identity states and away from others”
(Vignoles, 2011, p. 405). According to MICT, the motive for
distinctiveness has a guiding influence on these processes of
identity construction, together with at least five other motives.
Specifically, the theory proposes that people are generally moti-
vated to achieve and maintain feelings of self-esteem, continuity,
distinctiveness, belonging, efficacy, and meaning within their
identities.

Regarding the distinctiveness motive, there is substantial evi-
dence of the many ways that people seek to construct and maintain
distinctiveness of both individual and group identities (for reviews,
see Lynn & Snyder, 2002; Vignoles, 2009). People typically
remember information better if it distinguishes the self from others
(Leyens, Yzerbyt, & Rogier, 1997), are most likely to mention
their more distinctive attributes when asked to describe themselves
(McGuire & Padawer-Singer, 1976), and consider their more dis-
tinctive attributes as especially self-defining (Turnbull, Miller, &
McFarland, 1990; Vignoles et al., 2006). People also maintain and
enhance distinctiveness of their group identities by ingroup ste-
reotyping (van Rijswijk, Haslam, & Ellemers, 2006), by derogat-
ing ingroup imposters and deviants (Jetten, Summerville, Hornsey,
& Mewse, 2005; Marques & Paez, 1994), and by discriminating
against outgroups (Jetten, Spears, & Postmes, 2004). When feel-
ings of distinctiveness are threatened or undermined, people typ-
ically report reduced psychological well-being, and they attempt in
various ways to restore distinctiveness (Fromkin, 1970, 1972;
Jetten et al., 2004; Markus & Kunda, 1986; Pickett, Silver, &
Brewer, 2002; Powell, 1974; Snyder & Endelman, 1979).

Vignoles et al. (2006) reported four studies among diverse
groups of participants in the United Kingdom and Italy that
showed the influence of the motive for distinctiveness on identity
construction even when controlling for the influence of five other
identity motives. Each participant freely listed 12 aspects of his/her
identity (e.g., “woman,” “friend,” “musician,” “ambitious”) and
then rated each identity aspect for its perceived centrality within
identity as well as the extent to which it satisfied each of the six
identity motives proposed in MICT. In all four studies, participants
typically perceived as more central and self-defining those aspects
of their identities that they felt distinguished them to a greater
extent from others. The effect of distinctiveness on perceived
centrality remained significant after accounting for the effects of
other identity motives (for self-esteem, continuity, belonging, ef-
ficacy, and meaning), and a longitudinal test of the model showed
that distinctiveness had a significant prospective effect on per-
ceived centrality, whereas the reverse causal direction was not
supported.

Distinctiveness and Culture

However, all of this evidence for distinctiveness-seeking comes
from European and North American research. Cross-cultural the-
orists have suggested that the motive for distinctiveness may be
culturally specific. Indeed, in his classic text on cultural individ-
ualism and collectivism, Triandis (1995) has proposed that the
motive for distinctiveness will be stronger in individualistic cul-
tures and weaker in collectivistic cultures. Underlying this predic-
tion is the assumption that identity motives are derived from

internalization of cultural values—that people who live in cultures
where distinctiveness is valued will come to internalize this value,
and it is for this reason that they will seek to construct distinctive
identities (see, e.g., Breakwell, 1987; Markus & Kitayama, 1991;
Snyder & Fromkin, 1980).

In contrast with this position, others have proposed that the need
for distinctiveness is a “universal human motive” (Brewer &
Pickett, 1999, p. 85). Vignoles and collaborators (Vignoles, 2009;
Vignoles, Chryssochoou, & Breakwell, 2000) have argued that
establishing some form of distinctiveness is a logical precondition
for the existence of a meaningful sense of identity in any cultural
meaning system. This suggests that people would be motivated to
seek distinctiveness, whether they are living in a collectivistic or
an individualistic culture. Brewer and Roccas (2001) have even
argued that distinctiveness strivings may be stronger in collectiv-
istic cultural settings, compared to individualistic ones, as the
motive will be more frustrated—and thus aroused—in the context
of a cultural system where distinctiveness is not valued or is even
discouraged (for a similar argument, see Lo, Helwig, Chen,
Ohashi, & Cheng, 2011).

However, even if the distinctiveness motive is culturally uni-
versal, Vignoles et al. (2000) suggested that cultural systems may
come to emphasize different forms of distinctiveness, and these
emphases should be reflected in the identities of cultural members.
They proposed that distinctiveness can be constructed in three
ways: through difference, separateness, or social position, as illus-
trated in Figure 1. The most common way of operationalizing
distinctiveness in psychology is as difference, that is, distinctive-
ness in qualities such as abilities, opinions, personality, and ap-
pearance. In contrast, social position refers to distinctiveness in
one’s place within social relationships, including kinship ties,
friendships, roles, and social status. Separateness refers to distinc-
tiveness in terms of boundedness or distance from others, includ-
ing physical and symbolic boundaries, and feelings of privacy,
independence, and isolation. Although they viewed the motive for
distinctiveness as universal, Vignoles et al. hypothesized that
cultural beliefs and values would moderate the ways in which this
motive is satisfied. In other words, the strength of the motive
would be similar across cultures, but people would find different
ways of satisfying the motive—ways that fit their own cultural
meaning systems.

More precisely, Vignoles et al. (2000; Vignoles, 2009) hypoth-
esized that difference and separateness would be emphasized and
valued more as sources of distinctiveness in individualistic cul-
tures, reflecting the Western concept of the person as unique and
bounded (Geertz, 1975). On the other hand, they hypothesized that

Figure 1. Sources of distinctiveness (adapted from Vignoles et al., 2002).

835CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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social position would be emphasized and valued more in collec-
tivistic cultures, where the place of the individual within a network
of social relationships is a significant aspect of the concept of
personhood (e.g., Ho, 1993; Hsu, 1985).

Measuring Distinctiveness-Seeking Across Cultures

Evidence for cultural differences in the distinctiveness motive is
mostly limited to a small number of studies using explicit self-
report measures of need for uniqueness (NFU). Yamaguchi, Kuhl-
man, and Sugimori (1995) reported somewhat lower mean NFU
scores among Japanese and Korean undergraduates compared to
Americans, although statistical significance was not tested. Burns
and Brady (1992) found significantly lower mean NFU scores
among Malaysian than U.S. business students; however, this dif-
ference appeared only on the Lack of Concern for Others subscale,
suggesting a cultural difference in concern for social acceptance
rather than in the desire for uniqueness per se. Tafarodi, Marshall,
and Katsura (2004) found no difference between Japanese and
Canadian undergraduates in overall NFU scores, although Japa-
nese participants scored lower on items reflecting “desire to be
different.” These findings thus provide only limited evidence for
cultural variation in the distinctiveness motive.

Measuring Distinctiveness-Seeking

A concern with these studies is that the measurement of distinc-
tiveness motivation is based on participants’ self-reports in re-
sponse to direct questions about how much they want to be
different from others. As noted by Vignoles (2009), explicit NFU
scales may be measuring the subjective value placed on unique-
ness and difference rather than the respondent’s underlying psy-
chological motives. People are generally aware of their values,
whereas they may or may not be aware of their motives, and the
two do not necessarily coincide. For example, when research
participants in North America and Western Europe claim to value
being unique and different from others, this may be a way of
conforming with prevailing social norms—ironically, by saying
that they want to be different from others, these participants are
fitting in with their social environments rather than distinguishing
themselves from others (see Jetten, Postmes, & McAuliffe, 2002;
Salvatore & Prentice, 2011). Hence, it may be preferable to mea-
sure the distinctiveness motive using more indirect techniques—
perhaps especially when looking at cultural differences (for related
arguments, see Hofer & Bond, 2008; Kitayama, Park, Sevincer,
Karasawa, & Uskul, 2009).

Kim and Markus (1999, Study 3) tested the hypothesis of
cultural differences in preferences for uniqueness without asking
participants directly how much they wanted to be unique. They
asked travelers at an airport to complete a short survey, offering
them the choice of a pen in return. Participants were presented with
five pens that were identical except for their external color. The
ratio of uncommon (unique) to common (majority) colored pens
was 1:4 or 2:3. Participants were categorized as American or East
Asian (Korean or Chinese), and results indicated that Americans
were more likely to choose the uncommon pens than were East
Asians. This finding has been cited frequently as providing evi-
dence for a stronger preference for uniqueness among Westerners

(e.g., Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002; Stephens,
Markus, & Townsend, 2007; Walsh & Smith, 2007).

However, the dependent measure of pen choice is open to
alternative interpretations. East Asian participants could have
viewed the unique pen as more desirable, just as the Americans
did, but had other reasons for not choosing it. Indeed, Yamagishi,
Hashimoto, and Schug (2008) have shown that, rather than cultural
differences in preference for uniqueness, these results are better
explained by cultural differences in the behavioral strategies that
individuals rely on in ambiguous situations: Compared to Ameri-
cans, East Asians are more likely to be concerned about how they
will be evaluated by other individuals, which makes them choose
the unique pen less frequently. Beyond this debate about the
interpretation of the findings, the different colored pen in this
paradigm only relates to one of the three sources of distinctiveness
identified by Vignoles et al. (2000). Therefore, even if Kim and
Markus (1999) are right in their interpretation, this only shows
cultural variation in striving for difference (as one possible source
of distinctiveness). It does not necessarily indicate variation in
striving for distinctiveness as such.

Vignoles and Moncaster (2007) devised an alternative way of
measuring individual differences in the strength of the distinctive-
ness motive (and other identity motives), also without asking
participants directly how much they wanted to be distinctive. As in
the studies of Vignoles et al. (2006) described earlier, participants
listed freely a number of aspects of their identities, and then they
rated each identity aspect for its perceived centrality within their
subjective identity structures—that is, the extent to which they
perceived it as important and self-defining—and for the degree to
which it provided feelings that would satisfy each of the motives
they were interested in—for example, the extent to which it made
them feel that they were distinguished in any sense from other
people (for satisfaction of the distinctiveness motive). As in the
earlier studies, the motive satisfaction ratings were used to predict
the relative priority given to different aspects of identity within
participants’ subjective identity structures, but Vignoles and Mon-
caster’s analyses focused on individual differences rather than
testing the overall strength of each motive across their sample.
They reasoned that people with a relatively strong motive for
distinctiveness should show a relatively strong tendency to prior-
itize those aspects of their identities that they considered to dis-
tinguish them most from others and to marginalize those aspects of
their identities that did not satisfy this motive (for an illustration,
see Figure 2: Participant A); in contrast, this tendency should be
weaker among those with a weaker motive for distinctiveness (see
Figure 2: Participant B). Thus, individual differences in the
strength of association between distinctiveness ratings of aspects
of identity and their perceived centrality within subjective identity
structures could be used as an indirect measure of individual
differences in the strength of the distinctiveness motive.

Scores on this indirect measure have been used successfully to
predict several theorized outcomes of the distinctiveness motive,
including individual differences in national favoritism (Vignoles &
Moncaster, 2007) and in the preference for more or less distinctive
relationship partners (Petavratzi, 2004). Yet, they are largely in-
dependent of explicit self-reports of NFU (Eriksson, Becker, &
Vignoles, 2011), indicating that they are not simply measuring
participants’ beliefs about how much they want to be distinctive, or
the subjective value they place on uniqueness. Although the mea-

836 BECKER ET AL.

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sure is derived from explicit self-reports about the perceived
centrality and the distinctiveness of different aspects of identity,
participants are unlikely to be aware of the statistical patterns
within their responses that are the focus of the measurement.
Hence, the measure arguably can be characterized as an implicit
measure (a similar example is the Name Letter Task, which is
derived from explicit self-report data but is widely understood as
a measure of implicit self-esteem; see Krause, Back, Egloff, &
Schmukle, 2011; LeBel & Gawronski, 2009).

This approach to measuring identity motives is also well suited
for cross-cultural research. Because analysis is focused on within-
participant relationships in the data, this measurement technique is
insulated from several common sources of methodological bias in
cross-cultural research, including the reference-group effect
(Heine et al., 2002) and acquiescent response bias (Smith, 2004a).
In the only cross-cultural study to date, Eriksson et al. (2011)
found no difference between British and Swedish participants on
this indirect measure of the distinctiveness motive, despite the fact
that they did find national differences on an explicit self-report
scale of NFU that were partially mediated by individuals’ value
orientations. Thus, superficial differences in self-reported
distinctiveness-seeking were not replicated at this underlying level.

Measuring Culture

An additional concern about previous studies into culture and
distinctiveness is their restricted operational definition of culture.
With the exception of Eriksson et al. (2011), all of the cross-
cultural studies reviewed above have been based on bicultural
comparisons between North American and East Asian participants,
assumed to represent differences on the broad cultural dimension
of individualism– collectivism. Although bicultural comparisons
undoubtedly provide a valuable starting point in cross-cultural

research, exclusive reliance on studies of this kind is problematic
for several reasons.

First, no pair of nations can possibly represent the world’s
individualistic and collectivistic cultures more generally. Even if
they are carefully selected, they will still inevitably differ from
each other in many ways apart from their levels of individualism–
collectivism. Moreover, East Asian nations, such as Japan and
South Korea, are relatively atypical of the world’s collectivistic
cultures, both in their relative affluence and in their Confucian
philosophical heritage. Just as one would not draw conclusions
about the personality dimension of introversion– extraversion by
comparing the behavior of a single introvert with that of a single
extravert, so it is necessary to study a sample of cultural groups—
and to sample these groups as widely as possible—if one wants to
draw firmer conclusions about the implications of a given cultural
dimension (Smith, Bond, & Kağitçibaşi, 2006).

Although many researchers still base their characterization of
national cultures on anecdotal evidence (or sometimes, it has been
argued, on stereotypes; see Takano & Osaka, 1999), several em-
pirically based national indices of individualism– collectivism
have been published by cross-cultural organizational psycholo-
gists. The best known of these is Hofstede’s (1980) individualism
index; however, Hofstede derived this measure from data collected
around 40 years ago for an entirely different purpose, and the items
have questionable face validity as a measure of individualism–
collectivism (see Smith et al., 2006). More recently, the Global
Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE)
project has produced nation scores for 18 cultural dimensions
based on a survey spanning 62 nations (House, Hanges, Javidan,
Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). The GLOBE project’s index of in-
group collectivism practices is closely related both theoretically
and empirically with Hofstede’s individualism index. However,
the GLOBE project improved on Hofstede’s methodology in at

Figure 2. Examples of subjective identity structures from two participants. A more positive correlation
between the feeling of distinctiveness from other people that an aspect of identity provides and the perceived
centrality of that aspect within identity suggests a stronger motive for distinctiveness. Here, Participant A
appears to have a stronger motive for distinctiveness than Participant B.

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least three ways: (1) the content of their measures was theoretically
driven, and scale items were extensively validated across cultures;
(2) the data are more recent, accounting for cultural change in the
intervening years; and (3) the measures were derived in a more
statistically defensible manner (see Javidan, House, Dorfman,
Hanges, & de Luque, 2006). Thus, although the GLOBE project is
less well-known among social psychologists than Hofstede’s work,
we believe that the GLOBE scores for in-group collectivism prac-
tices provide a better archival index of national differences in
individualism– collectivism.

Archival measures are useful for sample selection purposes, but
they do not substitute for direct measurement of cultural orienta-
tions. Particular samples may not be representative of the broader
trend of cultural differences between two or more nations, and so
it is important to measure differences between the actual groups
sampled on the cultural dimension of interest (Smith et al., 2006).
Moreover, cultural orientations can be measured at more than one
level of analysis. On one level, they are properties of particular
social contexts (organizations, regions, ethnicities, nations) and,
thus, should be measured ideally at a contextual level of analysis
(see Hofstede, 1980). However, it is to be expected also that
individuals will differ in the extent to which they internalize any
given cultural orientation. If individual- and group-level effects are
modeled together, then it becomes possible to distinguish the
effects of internalizing a particular cultural orientation oneself
from the effects of living in a particular cultural context (e.g.,
Gheorghiu, Vignoles, & Smith, 2009).

When measuring individualism– collectivism, it is important to
recognize that this broad dimension encompasses a complex as-
sortment of more specific differences in domains such as values,
beliefs, norms, attitudes, and behaviors, which cluster together
only moderately on a cultural level of analysis and hardly at all on
an individual level of analysis (see Owe et al., in press). Given that
not all of these characteristics will be shared in equal measure by
every individualistic or collectivistic culture, Brewer and Chen
(2007) have argued that it is preferable to measure different facets
of individualism– collectivism separately rather than relying on the
very broad and often unreliable measures that have more com-
monly been used. In the current study, we focused our measure-
ment on two psychological domains that we considered to be
especially crucial aspects of the broader distinction between indi-
vidualism and collectivism: social values and beliefs about per-
sonhood.

In common with many cross-cultural psychologists, Schwartz
(1992, 2004) has argued that studying values is an especially
efficient way to capture and characterize cultural variation (see
also Chinese Culture Connection, 1987; Hofstede, 1980; Smith &
Schwartz, 1997). Based on an extensive cross-cultural study of
value priorities, Schwartz (1992) concluded that individual differ-
ences in value priorities are organized in a circumplex structure,
which can be represented in terms of two bipolar dimensions of
openness to change versus conservation and self-enhancement
versus self-transcendence. This structure has been found in more
than 75 nations, and a similar (but not identical) structure can be
used to capture cross-national differences in values (Schwartz,
2004). On this contextual level of analysis, the individual-level
distinction between openness and conservation values is largely
recaptured in a conceptually similar nation-level dimension that
Schwartz (2004) has labeled autonomy versus embeddedness (see

also Fischer, 2011; Fischer, Vauclair, Fontaine, & Schwartz,
2010). Crucially, both the individual-level and the nation-level
dimensions contrast value priorities of self-direction and stimula-
tion—thought to be typical of individualistic cultures—with those
of tradition, security, and conformity—thought to be typical of
collectivistic cultures (Welzel, 2010). Gheorghiu et al. (2009)
found that scores on this dimension derived from representative
samples in 21 nations converged very closely with Hofstede’s
(1980) individualism index and with the GLOBE project’s scores
for in-group collectivism. Nevertheless, Knafo, Schwartz, and
Levine (2009) reported that autonomy– embeddedness scores have
greater predictive value than global individualism– collectivism,
probably reflecting their greater theoretical precision.

In recent years, Bond and Leung (Bond et al., 2004; Leung et al.,
2002) have argued that, notwithstanding the importance of cultural
differences in values, it is also highly important to examine the
nature and consequences of differences in beliefs across cultures.
Owe et al. (in press) recently developed a targeted measure to tap
into the beliefs about personhood thought to underlie individual-
istic and collectivistic ways of thinking. Following research and
theory suggesting that members of individualistic cultures are
prone to adopt a “de-contextualized” view of personhood com-
pared to members of collectivistic cultures (e.g., Miller, 1984;
Shweder & Bourne, 1984; Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, &
Sinha, 1995), they devised a new measure of contextualism beliefs.
This measure showed an equivalent factor structure across 19
nations and between individual and national levels of analysis,
indicating that the dimension of contextualism beliefs could be
used validly to characterize both individuals and national groups.
National scores on this measure converged with archival indices of
national individualism– collectivism and predicted incremental
variance in national differences in several theoretically relevant
outcomes (corruption, in-group favoritism, and differential trust of
in-group and out-group members) after accounting for the contri-
bution of autonomy– embeddedness values. Thus, it seems that
autonomy– embeddedness values and contextualism beliefs are
distinct and complementary facets within the broader construct of
individualism– collectivism.

A further issue that requires consideration is the relationship
between individualism– collectivism and national economic
wealth. Because cultural individualism is strongly correlated with
economic development (Hofstede, 2001; Weber, 1905/1958), it
may be useful to measure these dimensions together so as to
distinguish their effects (Smith, 2004b). However, there is little or
no consensus currently about how best to treat this issue in statis-
tical analyses. For example, Hofstede (1980, 2006) has proposed
that one should partial out affluence when looking at the correlates
of national individualism, whereas Javidan et al. (2006) have
argued that to do so may be removing meaningful cultural vari-
ance, because economic development could be a consequence as
well as a cause of individualism.

Research Aims

Extending previous research by Vignoles et al. (2006) on iden-
tity motives and on the motive for distinctiveness in particular
(Eriksson et al., 2011; Vignoles, Chryssochoou, & Breakwell,
2002), the central purpose of the current study was to examine how
the operation of the distinctiveness motive can be influenced by

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the cultural context surrounding the person. Our study was con-
ducted among participants in 21 cultural groups, spanning 19
nations across four continents.

We measured the strength of the distinctiveness motive using an
extended and culturally decentered version of the methodology of
Vignoles and Moncaster (2007). In addition to modeling within-
participant relationships between the distinctiveness and perceived
centrality of identity aspects, we also modeled the relationships
between distinctiveness and the positive affective valence of iden-
tity aspects. We should acknowledge that Vignoles et al. (2006)
did not find a positive relationship between distinctiveness and
positive affect on average across their Western European partici-
pants; however, our main focus in the current study was on
individual and cultural differences in this relationship, not on its
mean level. We reasoned that participants with a stronger motive
for distinctiveness would show a relatively stronger tendency to be
more happy about those aspects of their identities that distin-
guished them more from others and less happy about those aspects
of their identities that distinguished them less from others; in
contrast, those with a weaker motive for distinctiveness would
show a weaker tendency, or perhaps even the reverse. Thus,
within-participant relationships of distinctiveness with perceived
centrality and of distinctiveness with positive affect would serve as
two separate indicators of differences in the strength of the motive
for distinctiveness. We expected that, on average, participants
would be motivated to achieve a sense of distinctiveness within
their identities and, thus, that they would perceive as more central
to their identities, and be happier about, those identity aspects that
are associated more strongly with a general sense of distinctive-
ness.

Our first main aim was to investigate whether the strength of the
distinctiveness motive, measured in these two ways, is moderated
by culture. As discussed above, we estimated cultural orientation
toward individualism– collectivism by measuring two different
aspects of culture—autonomy-embeddedness values and contex-
tualism beliefs—to establish whether our findings were suffi-
ciently robust to generalize across these alternative measures.
Hence, we tested the effects of cultural values and beliefs on the
strength of the motive for distinctiveness in separate, parallel
analyses. Moderation of the strength of within-participant relation-
ships between distinctiveness and perceived centrality or between
distinctiveness and positive affect by these measures of cultural
orientation would indicate that the strength of the distinctiveness
motive varies by culture, whereas the absence of moderation
effects would signify that the motive is independent of these values
and beliefs. Given the lack of consensus in the literature about how
best to treat the relationship between individualism– collectivism
and national affluence, we opted for the more conservative route of
controlling for affluence; however, we also conducted parallel
analyses that do not control for affluence (reported in Footnotes
5–10). Additionally, to control for the possibility that our samples
might be differentially affluent within their respective nations, we
included and controlled for an individual-level self-report measure
of socioeconomic status.

Three competing predictions were tested, derived from the lit-
erature reviewed above. From a relativist perspective (e.g., Trian-
dis, 1995), it has been proposed that the motive for distinctiveness
will be stronger among individuals in more individualistic cultures
(Hypothesis 1 [H1]), on the basis that individualistic cultures

portray distinctiveness as a desirable attribute. In direct contrast,
from a universalist perspective, Brewer and Roccas (2001) have
proposed that the motive will be stronger among individuals in
more collectivist cultures (Hypothesis 2 [H2]), on the basis that
collectivistic cultures will provide fewer opportunities to satisfy
this motive, leading to frustration and hence to greater arousal of
the motive. Our own perspective (e.g., Vignoles et al., 2000)
suggests that the strength of the motive for distinctiveness should
be relatively similar across individualistic and collectivistic cul-
tures (Hypothesis 3 [H3]) because the motive is understood to be
universal, and because different cultural systems are understood to
provide different— but equally viable—ways of satisfying the
motive.

Our second main aim was to clarify whether distinctiveness is
achieved in different ways, depending on cultural context, testing
Vignoles et al.’s (2000; Vignoles, 2009) predictions regarding
sources of distinctiveness. Consistent with previous research in the
United Kingdom (Vignoles et al., 2002), we expected that partic-
ipants would perceive as providing a greater sense of distinctive-
ness those identity aspects that made them feel different or sepa-
rate from others or that gave them a specific social position.
Crucially, we examined whether cultural orientation toward
individualism– collectivism would moderate the extent to which
individuals used difference, separateness, or social position as
sources of distinctiveness, again controlling for effects of individ-
ual and national wealth. Across cultures, we expected to observe
that distinctiveness is constructed in different ways, depending on
cultural orientations toward individualism– collectivism. More
precisely, as we have discussed above, the importance of differ-
ence and separateness as sources of distinctiveness was expected
to be stronger among individuals in more individualistic cultures
(Hypothesis 4 [H4], Hypothesis 5 [H5]). The importance of social
position as a source of distinctiveness was expected to be stronger
among individuals in less individualistic cultures (Hypothesis 6
[H6]).

We had no strong a priori expectations regarding whether the
hypothesized moderation effects would be found at the cultural or
at the individual level—in other words, whether or not these
differences would be dependent on individuals’ personal internal-
ization of the relevant cultural beliefs and values; nevertheless, our
multilevel design allowed us to explore this question by differen-
tiating between effects of individual differences and effects of
living in a given cultural context. We return to this issue in the
discussion.

Method

Participants and Procedure

A total of 5,254 late adolescents in 21 cultural groups partici-
pated in the study. Ninety-six individuals were excluded because
they reported having lived less than 10 years in the country or
being 25 years of age or more, thus leaving a sample of 5,158.
(Individual-level sample sizes are slightly lower in our analyses
because of missing data on some variables.) The mean age of the
overall sample was 16.74 years, and 55% of participants were
female (additional descriptive data, including sample size, gender,
and age distribution for each sample, can be found in Table 1). In
most cases, each cultural sample was from a different nation.

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However, given the size and diversity of Brazil, regional samples
from five different sites were included from this nation. Based on
initial analyses, we distinguished three cultural profiles within the
Brazilian data: The most individualistic profile was found among
participants from Porto Alegre (Southern coastal region), whereas
the participants from Belem (Northern inland region), Rio de
Janeiro, and João Pessoa (Southeastern and Northeastern coastal
regions) showed an intermediate profile, and the participants from
Goiânia (Central, inland region) showed a more collectivistic
profile.1 The data were divided according to these distinctions in
cultural orientation, and three Brazilian cultural groups were used
in all subsequent analyses. All participants were students in high
schools or equivalent, except in the Philippines, where, to match
the age range of participants from other nations, it was necessary
to sample university students. The participation of mainly high
school students means that the samples are likely to have been
somewhat more representative of their respective cultures than
would have been the case had university or college students been
sampled, given that overall participation rates are higher for upper
secondary than for tertiary education (United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2010). Participants were re-
cruited voluntarily at their schools and were not compensated in
any way. In nations where this was an ethical requirement, parental
consent was obtained in advance. Participants were told that the
questionnaire formed part of a university project on beliefs,
thoughts, and feelings; however, they remained uninformed about
the specific purpose of the research and about its cross-cultural
character. Administration of the questionnaire was usually in
smaller groups or whole classes, although individual administra-
tion was used for cultural groups where the local research team
thought this was necessary.

Measures

Measures were included within a larger questionnaire concern-
ing identity construction and cultural orientation. Only the mea-
sures relevant to this article are described here. The questionnaires
were translated from English into the main language of each
country, indicated in Table 1. Independent back-translations were
made by bilinguals who were not familiar with the research topic
and hypotheses. Ambiguities and inconsistencies were identified
and resolved by discussion, adjusting the translations where nec-
essary.

Generation of identity aspects. First, participants were
asked to freely generate 10 answers to the question “Who are
you?” (hereafter, these answers are referred to as identity aspects),
using an adapted version of the Twenty Statements Test (TST;
Kuhn & McPartland, 1954). This part of the questionnaire was
located at the very beginning of the questionnaire, so that re-
sponses would be constrained as little as possible by theoretical
expectations or demand characteristics. It was printed on a page
that folded out to the side of the main answer booklet, so that
participants could see their identity aspects during the ratings that
followed.

Previous studies using the TST methodology to access identity
content have sometimes been criticized for priming an individu-
alized, decontextualized, introspective “self” that may be closer to

1 These three groups differed both on openness (vs. conservation) val-
ues, F(2, 711) � 14.97, p � .001, �2 � .04, and contextualism beliefs, F(2,
711) � 9.83, p � .001, �2 � .03. All pairwise comparisons indicated
significant differences ( ps � .026). Descriptives for these samples on the
cultural orientation variables are provided in Table 1.

Table 1
Descriptive Statistics for Each Cultural Sample

Sample N % female M age
M subjective

wealth
M openness to change

(vs. conservation) values
M contextualism

beliefs
GNI per
capita

Questionnaire
language

Belgium 246 68 17.33 4.05 1.20 �.46 41,110 French
Brazil, Belem, Rio de Janeiro, João Pessoa 400 62 16.69 3.77 1.11 �.24 5,860 Portuguese
Brazil, Goiânia 123 49 14.85 3.66 0.68 .03 5,860 Portuguese
Brazil, Porto Alegre 210 65 16.95 4.10 1.44 �.49 5,860 Portuguese
Chile 394 47 16.21 4.65 0.97 �.77 8,190 Spanish
China 227 48 15.88 3.58 0.46 �.56 2,370 Chinese
Colombia 203 43 15.84 4.40 1.27 �.59 4,100 Spanish
Estonia 234 59 16.86 4.35 1.23 �.14 12,830 Estonian
Ethiopia 249 45 17.57 3.62 0.17 .12 220 Amharic
Georgia 246 58 16.11 4.27 0.67 �.58 2,120 Georgian
Hungary 238 52 16.49 4.45 1.23 �.73 11,680 Hungarian
Italy 318 52 17.75 4.24 0.49 �.31 33,490 Italian
Lebanon 295 46 17.07 4.55 0.67 �.41 5,800 Arabic
Namibia 96 64 17.30 3.45 0.14 �.75 3,450 English
Oman 248 49 16.51 4.83 0.07 �.27 12,860 Arabic
Philippines 296 66 17.38 4.23 0.14 .41 1,620 English
Poland 249 57 17.24 4.54 0.97 �.64 9,850 Polish
Romania 220 49 17.08 4.79 0.74 �.51 6,390 Romanian
Spain 223 53 16.44 4.59 1.19 �.72 29,290 Spanish
Turkey 197 50 16.52 4.10 0.19 �.10 8,030 Turkish
United Kingdom 246 76 16.66 4.20 1.24 �.68 40,660 English

Total 5,158 55 16.74 4.25 0.79 �.40

Note. GNI per capita � gross national income per capita in U.S. dollars.

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Western than to other cultural conceptions of self-hood (see Smith,
2011). To achieve a culturally decentered version of this task, we
held extensive discussions with study collaborators. As a result, we
reworded the original question “Who am I?” into “Who are you?”
We also developed a new, decentered version of the instructions
following this question:

In the numbered spaces below, please write down 10 things about
yourself. You can write your answers as they occur to you without
worrying about the order, but together they should summarize the
image you have of who you are. Your answers might include social
groups or categories you belong to, personal relationships with others,
as well as characteristics of yourself as an individual. Some may be
things that other people know about, others may be your private
thoughts about yourself. Some things you may see as relatively
important, and others less so. Some may be things you are relatively
happy about, and others less so.

We indeed found individual characteristics (e.g., “sociable,” “in-
telligent,” “shy”), social roles, and interpersonal relationships
(e.g., “friend,” “son,” “pupil”) as well as social categories (e.g.,
“girl,” “human being,” “British”) among common answers.

Ratings of identity aspects. Participants were then asked to
rate each of their identity aspects on a number of different dimen-
sions. Each dimension was presented as a question at the top of a
new page, with a block of 11-point scales positioned underneath to
line up with the identity aspects. Two questions were included to
tap the cognitive and affective dimensions of identity construction,
respectively. A first question measured the perceived centrality of
each identity aspect within participants’ subjective identity struc-
tures (“How important is each of these things in defining who you
are?”; scale anchors were 0 � not at all important, 10 � extremely
important). A second question measured positive affect in relation
to each identity aspect (“How happy or unhappy do you feel about
each of these things?”; scale anchors were 0 � extremely unhappy,
10 � extremely happy).

Four questions measured the association of each identity aspect
with feelings of distinctiveness: general distinctiveness (“How
much do you feel that each of these things distinguishes you—in
any sense—from other people?”; scale anchors were 0 � not at all,
10 � extremely), social position (“How much does each of these
things give you a particular role or position in relation to others?’;
scale anchors were 0 � not at all, 10 � extremely), difference
(“How much does each of these things make you a different kind
of person from others?”; scale anchors were 0 � not at all, 10 �
extremely), and separateness (“How much does each of these
things create any sort of boundary between yourself and others?”;
scale anchors were 0 � not at all, 10 � extremely).

To ensure that distinctiveness was not made salient before
participants answered the perceived centrality and affect measures,
these measures were placed before the measure of distinctiveness,
separated by several pages of intervening measures. Similarly, the
measures for social position, difference, and separateness were
placed after the general distinctiveness item in another section of
the questionnaire. These four questions related to distinctiveness
were interspersed among 19 other rating questions related to other
identity motives (e.g., belonging and self-esteem).

Portrait value questionnaire. We used a short version of this
questionnaire, created by Schwartz (2007; see also Schwartz &
Rubel, 2005, Study 1). The 21-item scale incorporates statements

presented as short descriptions of a person. Respondents are asked
to indicate how much each description is or is not like them. The
6-point response scale ranges from 1 (very much like me) to 6 (not
like me at all); however, we reverse-coded all items so that higher
scores would reflect greater endorsement of the value portrayed in
the item. As recommended by Schwartz and Rubel (2005), we then
ipsatized the responses by centering each participant’s item scores
around his or her mean across all the items (i.e., subtracting the
participant’s mean on the scale from his or her score on each item)
to eliminate individual differences in response style.2

These ipsatized scores were used to create a measure of the
bipolar value dimension of interest to the present study: openness
to change versus conservation values (12 items: overall � � .69,
Mdn � � .68).3 Sample items for this dimension were as follows:
“He/she looks for adventures and likes to take risks. He/she wants
to have an exciting life,” and “It is important to him/her to always
behave properly. He/she wants to avoid doing anything people
would say is wrong” (reversed). As described above, nation-level
scores from this bipolar dimension can be used as an indicator of
individualism– collectivism (Gheorghiu et al., 2009; Welzel,
2010).4

Contextualism. This scale, developed by Owe et al. (in
press), taps into the beliefs about personhood that are thought to
underlie cultural collectivism. It measures beliefs about the impor-
tance (vs. unimportance) of social and contextual attributes in
defining a person. The scale consists of six balanced items, in-

2 All models presented were also computed with non-ipsatized scores for
values and beliefs, and the results were the same. Full details of these
analyses are available from the first author on request.

3 On each of our cultural orientation measures, a number of samples had
mediocre individual-level reliabilities. This is a common problem for
measures of cultural difference and has been argued to be a foreseeable
downside of any measure with sufficient bandwidth among the items to
provide validity in a variety of cultures (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, &
Gelfand, 1995). Particularly relevant to the Portrait Value Questionnaire
used here, Fontaine, Poortinga, Delbeke, and Schwartz (2008) found that
samples from less developed nations deviate more from the theoretical
structure of the value model than samples from more developed nations. As
a consequence, lower individual-level reliabilities on our measure of open-
ness (vs. conservation) would be expected in samples with lower scores on
this same dimension. Of importance here is that even if individual-level
reliabilities of our measures of cultural orientation are mediocre in some of
the cultural samples, the cultural-level reliabilities are very good (openness
[vs. conservation]: � � .84; contextualism beliefs: � � .94). Given that our
main findings draw on effects situated on this higher level of analysis, poor
reliabilities on the individual level do not challenge these findings.

4 Recent studies of the similarity— or isomorphism— of value structures
at an individual and at a nation level have found that, although isomor-
phism is not perfect, there is substantial similarity in structure between the
two levels of analysis (Fischer, 2011; Fischer et al., 2010). The dimension
of openness to change versus conservation values presents relatively higher
levels of isomorphism, enabling the use of this dimension when comparing
both national samples and individuals, especially if researchers are inter-
ested in the broader underlying dimension rather than more specific value
types (Fischer, 2011). Nevertheless, based on recommendations by S. H.
Schwartz (personal communication, March 1, 2011), the presented analy-
ses were also conducted using a shorter scale (omitting two items) for
autonomy– embeddedness values (i.e., the culture-level value dimension).
The same pattern of results was found using this shorter scale.

841CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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cluding, for example, “To understand a person well, it is essential
to know about his/her family” and “One can understand a person
well without knowing about the place he/she comes from” (re-
versed). Participants rated their level of agreement with each
statement on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (completely disagree)
to 6 (completely agree). As for values, participants’ ratings were
ipsatized to remove differences in response style (overall � � .75,
Mdn � � .73; see Footnote 3). The degree of contextualism was
used in our analyses as an indicator of collectivism–individualism.

Demographic information. Participants were asked to indi-
cate their gender, date of birth, nationality, country of birth, and a
number of other demographic characteristics. They were also
asked to estimate their family’s wealth relative to other people
living in their nation (“Compared to other people in [nation], how
would you describe your family’s level of financial wealth?”) on a
7-point scale ranging from 1 (very poor) to 7 (very rich). To
control for national differences in economic development, we
included data on gross national income (GNI) per capita, retrieved
from the World Bank (2010) report.

Statistical Analyses

Given the nested structure of the data, we used multilevel
regression analysis (Hox, 2002) to test our hypotheses. All anal-
yses were conducted with HLM 6 (Raudenbush, Bryk, & Cong-
don, 2007) using full maximum likelihood estimation with a con-
vergence criterion of .000001. Rather than individuals, the primary
unit of analysis was identity aspects. Level 1 units were identity
aspects (N � 45,406), with individuals as Level 2 units (N �
4,751), and cultures as Level 3 units (N � 21). At Level 1,
regression equations were modeled for within-participant variables
(perceived centrality, positive affect, general distinctiveness, dif-
ference, separateness, and social position). Predictors on this level
were centered around participant means, thus ensuring that the
within-participant effects that we were interested in were not
confounded with between-participant covariance (Hofmann &
Gavin, 1998; Raudenbush, 1989). At Level 2, regression coeffi-
cients were modeled for individual difference variables (gender,
subjective wealth, individual value priorities, and individual con-
textualism). Gender was included to control for differences in the
gender composition of our samples, but we had no theoretical basis
for predicting gender effects. At Level 3, regression coefficients
were modeled for culture-level variables (group mean value pri-
orities, group mean contextualism, and GNI per capita). Continu-
ous variables at Levels 2 and 3 were centered around their grand
means, and a dummy code was used for gender (female � –1,
male � 1). We used grand-mean centering rather than group-mean
centering at Level 2 to provide a more accurate test of Level 3
effects within our models, controlling for the potential confound-
ing influence of aggregated individual-level relationships when
testing culture-level relationships (Firebaugh, 1980; Hofmann &
Gavin, 1998).

Our main hypotheses involved testing cross-level interactions in
which variables at Levels 2 and 3 were allowed to moderate the
strengths of relationships observed at Level 1. As discussed by
McClelland and Judd (1993), it is notoriously difficult to detect
moderation effects in correlational studies, and even substantively
important interactions may account for seemingly trivial amounts
of variance. Hence, in addition to estimating the proportion of

within-participants variance accounted for by our models (calcu-
lated as the proportional reduction in the Level 1 error term
compared to a null model; Hox, 2002), we have also estimated the
magnitude of the Level 1 effects at differing values of our cultural
moderators to help readers to evaluate the substantive importance
of those interaction effects that relate to our hypotheses (for a
similar approach, see Cooper, 2010).

Zero-order correlations for all variables are shown in Appendi-
ces A, B, and C. The study included measures of two alternative
indicators of cultural individualism– collectivism: openness (vs.
conservation) values and contextualism beliefs. As expected, these
two measures showed a moderately strong negative correlation at
the cultural level (r � –.49, p � .024) and a weak negative
correlation at the individual level (r � –.16, p � .001). This
provided an opportunity to test the robustness of our findings using
competing operational definitions of individualism– collectivism.
Consequently, we tested our hypotheses separately with each mea-
sure of cultural orientation, and results were compared.

Results

Strength of the Distinctiveness Motive
According to Culture

To test the strength of the distinctiveness motive across cultures,
we computed a series of models predicting the perceived centrality
of identity aspects in subjective identity structures as a function of
their distinctiveness. Subsequently, we computed a series of par-
allel models predicting positive affect associated with identity
aspects. Parameters of these models are shown in Table 2 (per-
ceived centrality) and Table 3 (positive affect).

Effects of distinctiveness on perceived centrality. In our
first model predicting perceived centrality, we included just the
general distinctiveness rating as a predictor at Level 1 (Model 1).
As expected, across the sample as a whole, distinctiveness was a
significant positive predictor of perceived centrality (B � .33, p �
.001), and this model accounted for an estimated 10.8% of within-
participants variance in perceived centrality.

Next, we added cross-level interaction effects to test whether the
strength of the distinctiveness motive was significantly moderated
by either individual or cultural value priorities, providing our first
test among the three competing hypotheses H1–H3. Thus, we
entered individual scores of openness (vs. conservation) values,
gender, and subjective wealth as Level 2 predictors of the Level 1
weight on distinctiveness, and cultural group means of openness
(vs. conservation) values and GNI per capita as Level 3 predictors
of the Level 1 weight on distinctiveness, to test for cross-level
interactions (Model 2). Following standard procedure for testing
interaction effects in multiple regression (Aiken & West, 1991),
we included the underlying main effects in our models alongside
the theoretically important interaction effects.

Compared with Model 1, this model was a significant improve-
ment, �2(10) � 39.11, p � .001, but there was no increase in
modeled variance at Level 1. Within this model, significant cross-
level interactions would mean that the weight of general distinc-
tiveness on perceived centrality varied according to individuals’
values, cultural mean values, gender, subjective wealth, or GNI per
capita. A negative cross-level interaction effect was found for
culture-level openness (vs. conservation) (B � –.02, p � .053).

842 BECKER ET AL.

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This signifies that the degree to which an identity aspect provided
a sense of distinctiveness had a marginally stronger effect on the
perceived centrality of that identity aspect in cultures where open-
ness values were relatively weaker and conservation values were
relatively stronger. In other words, the motive for distinctiveness
was marginally stronger in more collectivistic cultures.5 No sig-
nificant moderations of the individual-level variables or GNI per
capita were found.

To illuminate further the nature of the interaction between
culture-level openness (vs. conservation) and distinctiveness, we
used a simple slopes technique. The main effect of distinctiveness
on centrality was estimated at lower bound (�.10) and higher
bound (1.60) values of the moderator. Figure 3A illustrates that the
effect of distinctiveness was only very slightly stronger in cultures
with the lowest openness (vs. conservation) values (B � .35, p �
.001) compared to cultures with the highest scores on this dimen-
sion (B � .31, p � .001). Thus, the data were very clearly
inconsistent with H1, but they could be interpreted as supporting
either H2 (given the marginal interaction) or H3 (given that there
was only a very small difference in magnitude of the simple slopes
across the range of cultural variation in our sample).

We then ran a parallel model replacing openness (vs. conserva-
tion) values with contextualism on both the individual and culture
levels (Model 3). This model provided a significant improvement
over Model 1, �2(10) � 35.39, p � .001, but again there was no
increase in modeled variance. No significant moderation effects by
contextualism were found, although the estimated coefficient of
the cross-level interaction between culture-level contextualism and

distinctiveness was again in the direction predicted by H2 (B �
.03, p � .113). As in the previous model, no significant modera-
tions of the individual-level variables or GNI per capita were
found.6

We used simple slopes to explore further the relation between
culture-level contextualism and distinctiveness. The main effect of
distinctiveness on centrality was estimated at relatively low (�.95)
and high (.60) values of the moderator. This relation is plotted in
Figure 3B. Consistent with H3, the effect of distinctiveness was
broadly similar in cultures with the highest contextualism beliefs
(B � .36, p � .001) compared to those with the lowest contextu-
alism scores (B � .32, p � .001).

Effects of distinctiveness on positive affect. The same three
predictive models were run with positive affect replacing per-

5 A similar size negative estimate for the moderation effect of culture-
level openness (vs. conservation) values was found when controls were
included for the second value dimension from Schwartz’s (1992, 2004)
model of human values, self-transcendence (vs. self-enhancement) values,
and when not controlling for GNI per capita, subjective wealth, and gender.

6 The estimate of culture-level contextualism beliefs as a moderator of
the slope of distinctiveness on perceived centrality was similar (B � .02,
p � .200) when not controlling for GNI per capita, subjective wealth, and
gender. An additional model including both openness (vs. conservation)
values and contextualism beliefs as moderators resulted in similar esti-
mates, moderation by culture-level openness (vs. conservation) (B � –.02,
p � .141), and moderation by culture-level contextualism (B � .01, p �
.561).

Table 2
Estimated Parameters of Multilevel Regression Predicting Perceived Centrality

Variable

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

B SE p B SE p B SE p

Within-participants main effect (Level 1: N � 45,406 identity aspects)
General distinctiveness .33 .00 �.001 .33 .00 �.001 .33 .00 �.001

Individual-level main effects (Level 2: N � 4,751 individuals)
Openness (vs. Conservation) .02 .01 .209
Contextualism .02 .02 .267
Gendera �.07 .02 �.001 �.07 .02 �.001
Subjective wealth .04 .02 .024 .04 .02 .024

Culture-level main effects (Level 3: N � 21 cultural groups)
Openness (vs. Conservation) �.22 .15 .151
Contextualism .08 .22 .705
GNI per capita �.14 .05 .019 �.16 .05 .009

Individual-level moderators of within-participants slope
Openness (vs. Conservation) � General Distinctiveness .00 .00 .841
Contextualism � General Distinctiveness .00 .01 .387
Gender � General Distinctiveness .00 .00 .795 .00 .00 .884
Subjective Wealth � General Distinctiveness .01 .00 .194 .01 .00 .169

Culture-level moderators of within-participants slope
Openness (vs. Conservation) � General Distinctiveness �.02 .01 .053
Contextualism � General Distinctiveness .03 .02 .113
GNI per capita � General Distinctiveness .00 .00 .271 .00 .00 .440

Residual variance
Within-participant level (�2) 4.38 4.38 4.38
Individual level (
) .89 �.001 .89 �.001 .89 �.001
Culture level ( �) .12 �.001 .07 �.001 .08 �.001

Deviance 201,096 201,057 201,060

Note. GNI per capita � gross national income per capita in units of 10,000 U.S. dollars.
a Dummy coded as �1 � female, 1 � male.

843CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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ceived centrality as the outcome variable. The first model included
just the general distinctiveness rating as a predictor at Level 1
(Model 4). Across the sample as a whole, distinctiveness was a
significant positive predictor of positive affect (B � .31, p � .001),
and this model accounted for an estimated 6.9% of within-
participants variance in positive affect.

Next, we added cross-level interaction effects to test whether the
strength of the distinctiveness motive was significantly moderated
by either individual or cultural value priorities (Model 5). Again,
all main effects were also included. Compared with Model 4, this
model was a significant improvement, �2(10) � 153.44, p � .001,
and the amount of modeled Level 1 variance increased very
slightly to 7.0%. Consistent with H2, a negative cross-level inter-
action effect was found for culture-level openness (vs. conserva-
tion) (B � –.10, p � .001). This signifies that the degree to which
an identity aspect provided a sense of distinctiveness was more
closely associated with feelings of positive affect in cultures with
weaker openness values and stronger conservation values. In other
words, the motive for distinctiveness was significantly stronger in
more collectivistic cultures.7 In addition, there was a negative
interaction effect of GNI per capita (B � –.02, p � .001), indi-
cating that the effect of general distinctiveness on positive affect is
stronger in poorer nations. Simple slopes were used to probe the
interaction between culture-level openness (vs. conservation) val-
ues and distinctiveness. This interaction is plotted in Figure 3A.
Supporting H2, the effect of distinctiveness was more than 70%
stronger in cultures with the lowest scores for openness (vs.
conservation) values (B � .40, p � .001) compared to those with
the highest scores on this dimension (B � .23, p � .001).

Within Model 5, all three individual-level moderators were also
significant, although effects were very small in magnitude: gender
(B � –.01, p � .022), subjective wealth (B � .02, p � .003), and
individual-level openness (vs. conservation) (B � .01, p � .019).
These interactions indicate that distinctiveness had a slightly stron-
ger effect on positive affect among women, among participants
from richer families within their respective nations, and among
individuals with stronger openness (vs. conservation) values.
Given its relevance to our hypotheses, we used the simple slopes
technique to estimate the main effect of distinctiveness on affect at
the maximum (3.30) and minimum (�1.70) observed values of
individual-level openness (vs. conservation). The effect of distinc-
tiveness was somewhat stronger at the maximum score for open-
ness (vs. conservation) values (B � .35, p � .001) compared to the
minimum score (B � .25, p � .001). This provides modest support
for H1 at the individual level, in contrast with the culture-level
moderation that supported H2.

We then ran a parallel model replacing openness (vs. conserva-
tion) values with contextualism on both the individual and culture
levels (Model 6). This model provided a significant improvement
over Model 4, �2(10) � 106.40, p � .001, and the amount of
modeled variance increased very slightly to 7.0%. Supporting H2,

7 Similar estimates for the moderation effect of culture-level openness
(vs. conservation) values were found when controls were included for the
second value dimension from Schwartz’s (1992, 2004) model of human
values, self-transcendence (vs. self-enhancement) values, and when not
controlling for GNI per capita, subjective wealth, and gender.

Table 3
Estimated Parameters of Multilevel Regression Predicting Positive Affect

Variable

Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

B SE p B SE p B SE p

Within-participants main effect (Level 1: N � 45,406 identity aspects)
General distinctiveness .31 .01 �.001 .31 .01 �.001 .31 .01 �.001

Individual-level main effects (Level 2: N � 4,751 individuals)
Openness (vs. Conservation) .05 .02 .007
Contextualism .03 .02 .162
Gendera .08 .02 �.001 .07 .02 �.001
Subjective wealth .08 .02 �.001 .08 .02 �.001

Culture-level main effects (Level 3: N � 21 cultural groups)
Openness (vs. Conservation) �.23 .12 .079
Contextualism .10 .18 .592
GNI per capita �.14 .04 .006 �.15 .04 .003

Individual-level moderators of within-participants slope
Openness (vs. Conservation) � General Distinctiveness .01 .00 .019
Contextualism � General Distinctiveness .00 .01 .950
Gender � General Distinctiveness �.01 .01 .022 �.01 .01 .026
Subjective Wealth � General Distinctiveness .02 .01 .003 .02 .01 .001

Culture-level moderators of within-participants slope
Openness (vs. Conservation) � General Distinctiveness �.10 .01 �.001
Contextualism � General Distinctiveness .06 .02 .005
GNI per capita � General Distinctiveness �.02 .00 �.001 �.03 .00 �.001

Residual variance
Within-participant level (�2) 6.22 6.21 6.21
Individual level (
) 1.20 �.001 1.18 �.001 1.18 �.001
Culture level ( �) .09 �.001 .04 �.001 .04 �.001

Deviance 216,838 216,685 216,732

Note. GNI per capita � gross national income per capita in units of 10,000 U.S. dollars.
a Dummy coded as �1 � female, 1 � male.

844 BECKER ET AL.

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a positive cross-level interaction effect was found for culture-level
contextualism (B � .06, p � .005), indicating again that the motive
for distinctiveness was stronger in more collectivistic cultures.
Moderations by GNI per capita, gender, and subjective wealth
were consistent as found in Model 5. However, no individual-level
moderation by contextualism beliefs was found. Simple slopes
were used to probe the interaction between culture-level contex-
tualism and distinctiveness. This interaction is plotted in Figure
3B. Supporting H2, the effect of distinctiveness was over 30%
stronger in cultures with the strongest contextualism beliefs (B �
.37, p � .001) compared to those with the weakest contextualism
beliefs (B � .28, p � .001).8

Sources of Distinctiveness Satisfaction
According to Culture

To test for cultural differences in the construction of distinc-
tiveness, we next computed multilevel regression models predict-
ing general distinctiveness ratings using the three different sources
of distinctiveness: difference, separateness, and social position.
Parameters of these models are shown in Table 4. Model 7 in-
cluded just these three ratings as Level 1 predictors of the general
distinctiveness ratings. As hypothesized, all three sources of dis-
tinctiveness were significant predictors of the general distinctive-
ness ratings (Bs from .07 to .39), indicating that, overall, differ-
ence, separateness, and social position can serve as sources of a
general feeling of distinctiveness, and this model accounted for an
estimated 23.2% of within-participants variance in distinctiveness.

Next, we tested cross-level interaction effects to see whether the
weight of general distinctiveness on each of the three sources was
significantly moderated by either individual or cultural values,
providing our first test of hypotheses H4 –H6. Thus, we entered
individual scores of openness (vs. conservation) values, gender,
and subjective wealth as Level 2 predictors of the Level 1 weights,
and cultural means of openness (vs. conservation) values and GNI
per capita as Level 3 predictors of Level 1 weights on the three
sources of distinctiveness, again controlling for all underlying
main effects (Model 8). Compared to Model 7, this model pro-
vided a significant improvement in fit, �2(20) � 301.23, p � .001,

and accounted for an estimated 23.8% of the within-participants
variance in distinctiveness ratings. Crucially, we found a pattern of
significant cross-level interaction effects consistent with our pre-
dictions: Supporting H4 and H5, difference (B � .05, p � .001)
and separateness (B � .04, p � .001) were more important in
cultures with higher openness (vs. conservation) values; support-
ing H6, social position was more important in cultures with lower
openness (vs. conservation) values (B � –.06, p � .001).
Individual-level moderations were also found, although these were
much smaller in magnitude; the effect of difference was slightly
stronger among participants with stronger openness (vs. conserva-
tion) values (B � .02, p � .001), whereas the effect of separateness
was slightly stronger among participants with weaker openness
(vs. conservation) values (B � –.02, p � .001). Gender (B � –.02,
p � .002), subjective wealth (B � .02, p � .001), and GNI per
capita (B � .03, p � .001) also moderated the weight of general
distinctiveness on difference, suggesting that difference was more
important among women, among participants from richer families,
and among respondents from richer nations.9

Simple slopes were used to probe the interaction between
culture-level openness (vs. conservation) values and sources of
distinctiveness. The main effects of these sources were estimated
at relatively low (�.10) and high (1.60) values of the moderator.
These interactions are plotted in Figure 4A, which illustrates how
the effects of difference and separateness were clearly stronger in

8 The estimate of culture-level contextualism beliefs as a moderator of
the slope of distinctiveness on positive affect was similar (B � .08, p �
.001) when not controlling for GNI per capita, subjective wealth, and
gender. An additional model including both openness (vs. conservation)
values and contextualism beliefs as moderators resulted in a similar esti-
mate for the moderation by culture-level openness (vs. conservation) (B �
–.10, p � .001). However, the moderation by culture-level contextualism
was no longer significant (B � –.01, p � .638).

9 The same pattern of results was found when controls were included for
the second value dimension from Schwartz’s (1992, 2004) model of human
values, self-transcendence (vs. self-enhancement) values, and when not
controlling for GNI per capita, subjective wealth, and gender.

Figure 3. Sense of distinctiveness as a predictor of perceived identity centrality and positive identity affect,
depending on values (Panel A) and beliefs (Panel B) in participants’ cultural environment. Vertical dotted lines
represent observed minimum and maximum values for openness (vs. conservation) values and contextualism
beliefs, respectively.

845CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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cultures with higher openness (vs. conservation) values (B � .42,
p � .001, and B � .11, p � .001, respectively) compared to
cultures with lower values on this dimension (B � .34, p � .001,
and B � .04, p � .001, respectively). The effect of social position,
on the other hand, showed the opposite pattern; it was considerably
weaker in cultures with higher openness (vs. conservation) values
(B � .08, p � .001) than in cultures with weaker scores on this
dimension (B � .19, p � .001).

We subsequently ran a parallel model replacing openness (vs.
conservation) values with contextualism on both the individual and
culture levels (Model 9). This model provided a significant im-
provement over Model 7, �2(20) � 220.51, p � .001, and ex-
plained an estimated 23.6% of within-participant variance of the
measure of general distinctiveness. Crucially, we found a pattern
of cross-level interactions similar to those in the preceding anal-

ysis, although not identical. In particular, difference was more
important in cultures with lower contextualism beliefs (B � –.08,
p � .001) supporting H4, whereas social position was found to be
more important in cultures high on contextualism beliefs (B � .05,
p � .005) supporting H6. As in the preceding analysis, the slope
of difference was also significantly moderated by gender (B �
–.02, p � .001), subjective wealth (B � .02, p � .001), and GNI
per capita (B � .03, p � .001), suggesting that distinctiveness was
more strongly based on difference among women, among partic-
ipants from richer families, and in richer nations. Unlike the
previous analysis, the slope for separateness was not significantly
moderated by contextualism beliefs; thus, H5 was supported when
individualism– collectivism was operationalized in terms of values
but not in terms of beliefs. However, we did find a moderation
effect of GNI per capita (B � .01, p � .039), suggesting that

Table 4
Estimated Parameters of Multilevel Regression Predicting General Distinctiveness Ratings

Variable

Model 7 Model 8 Model 9

B SE p B SE p B SE p

Within-participants main effects (Level 1: N � 45,406 identity aspects)
Difference .39 .01 �.001 .38 .01 �.001 .38 .01 �.001
Separateness .07 .00 �.001 .07 .00 �.001 .08 .00 �.001
Social position .14 .00 �.001 .14 .00 �.001 .14 .00 �.001

Individual-level main effects (Level 2: N � 4,751 individuals)
Openness (vs. Conservation) .04 .02 .038
Contextualism .03 .02 .204
Gendera �.03 .02 .134 �.04 .02 .098
Subjective wealth .03 .02 .232 .03 .02 .211

Culture-level main effects (Level 3: N � 21 cultural groups)
Openness (vs. Conservation) �.51 .22 .036
Contextualism .46 .33 .177
GNI per capita �.19 .08 .029 �.22 .08 .015

Individual-level moderators of within-participants slopes
Openness (vs. Conservation) � Difference .02 .00 �.001
Openness (vs. Conservation) � Separateness �.02 .00 �.001
Openness (vs. Conservation) � Social Position .00 .00 .411
Contextualism � Difference .00 .01 .863
Contextualism � Separateness .00 .00 .772
Contextualism � Social Position �.01 .00 .181
Gender � Difference �.02 .01 .002 �.02 .01 .001
Gender � Separateness .00 .00 .264 .01 .00 .192
Gender � Social Position .00 .00 .862 .00 .00 .813
Subjective Wealth � Difference .02 .01 .001 .02 .01 �.001
Subjective Wealth � Separateness .00 .00 .746 .00 .00 .891
Subjective Wealth � Social Position .00 .00 .653 .00 .00 .718

Culture-level moderators of within-participants slopes
Openness (vs. Conservation) � Difference .05 .01 �.001
Openness (vs. Conservation) � Separateness .04 .01 �.001
Openness (vs. Conservation) � Social Position �.06 .01 �.001
Contextualism � Difference �.08 .02 �.001
Contextualism � Separateness �.01 .01 .618
Contextualism � Social Position .05 .02 .005
GNI per capita � Difference .03 .00 �.001 .03 .00 �.001
GNI per capita � Separateness .01 .00 .123 .01 .00 .039
GNI per capita � Social Position .00 .00 .449 .00 .00 .804

Residual variance
Within-participant level (�2) 3.68 3.65 3.66
Individual level (
) 1.87 �.001 1.87 �.001 1.87 �.001
Culture level ( �) .30 �.001 .17 �.001 .18 �.001

Deviance 196,390 196,089 196,169

Note. GNI per capita � gross national income per capita in units of 10,000 U.S. dollars.
a Dummy coded as �1 � female, 1 � male.

846 BECKER ET AL.

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distinctiveness was more strongly based on separateness among
participants from richer nations.10

Main effects of the three sources of distinctiveness were esti-
mated at relatively low (�.95) and high (.60) values of culture-
level contextualism beliefs. These interactions are plotted in Figure
4B and show that the effect of social position was clearly stronger
in cultures with higher contextualism beliefs (B � .18, p � .001)
compared to cultures with weaker contextualism beliefs (B � .11,
p � .001). The effect of difference, on the other hand, was
considerably weaker in cultures with higher contextualism beliefs
(B � .30, p � .001) compared to cultures with lower contextualism
beliefs (B � .43, p � .001).

Discussion

Strength of the Distinctiveness Motive Across Cultures

Participants from 21 cultural groups across four continents
generally gave priority in their subjective identity structures to
those aspects of their identities that provided them with greater
feelings of distinctiveness: In particular, they perceived these
identity aspects as more important for their self-definitions and
associated them with more positive affect compared to those
identity aspects that they perceived as distinguishing them less
from others. Consistent with the view that establishing distinctive-
ness is a precondition for the construction of a coherent sense of
identity in any cultural context (Vignoles, 2009; Vignoles et al.,
2000), our results suggest that individuals strive for a distinctive
identity, whichever cultural meaning system they are surrounded
by. Effects of distinctiveness on perceived centrality of identity
aspects and on identity-related affect were estimated to be signif-
icant at p � .001 across the full range of variation in cultural
beliefs and values sampled in our study. Hence, even if people are
not necessarily aware of it, it seems that distinctiveness-seeking
processes generalize robustly to cultural contexts well beyond the
Western European and North American contexts where the major-
ity of previous studies into distinctiveness-seeking have been
conducted (reviewed by Lynn & Snyder, 2002; Vignoles, 2009).

Unlike most previous studies into culture and distinctiveness
seeking, our approach to measuring the distinctiveness motive here
did not rely on explicit measures of self-reported NFU. Instead, we
used a more subtle approach to measuring this motive, tapping into
the influence of distinctiveness-seeking on identity construction
and the affective importance of distinctiveness within identity.
Vignoles (2009, 2011) has argued that explicit measures are more
likely to reflect the extent to which individuals value particular
identity states such as distinctiveness (or uniqueness) rather than
the strength of their underlying motives. Thus, Eriksson et al.
(2011) showed differences between samples of British and Swed-
ish participants on an explicit scale of NFU—which were partially
accounted for by differences in value priorities— but participants
in both samples tended to prioritize to a similar extent those
aspects of their identities that provided a greater sense of distinc-
tiveness. Our results add to this, showing that the underlying
motive to attain a distinctive identity is relevant across a much
larger range of cultural contexts.11

Nevertheless, we did find some evidence that the strength of the
distinctiveness motive varied meaningfully with cultural orienta-
tion. At the individual level of analysis, there was a slight tendency

10 The same pattern of effects of contextualism was found when not
controlling for GNI per capita, subjective wealth, and gender. An addi-
tional model including both openness (vs. conservation) values and con-
textualism beliefs as moderators resulted in similar moderations of the
slope for difference (culture-level openness [vs. conservation], B � .03,
p � .020; culture-level contextualism, B � –.05, p � .026) and separate-
ness (culture-level openness [vs. conservation], B � .04, p � .001; culture-
level contextualism, B � .01, p � .574). However, only the moderation by
values remained significant for the slope of social position (culture-level
openness [vs. conservation], B � –.06, p � .001; culture-level contextu-
alism, B � .00, p � .912).

11 Indeed, consistent with the findings of Eriksson et al. (2011), we note
that the same conclusions would not have been drawn had we tested the
present hypotheses with a direct measure. As part of a later stage of our
study, a subset of respondents (N � 3,272, from 18 of the 21 cultural
groups) also completed the Self-Attributed Need for Uniqueness scale

Figure 4. Difference, social position, and separateness as predictors of a general sense of distinctiveness,
depending on values (Panel A) and beliefs (Panel B) in participants’ cultural environment. Vertical dotted lines
represent observed minimum and maximum values for openness (vs. conservation) values and contextualism
beliefs, respectively.

847CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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for those individuals with relatively stronger openness (vs. con-
servation) values within their respective cultural groups to show a
stronger relationship between distinctiveness and positive affect.
This provides qualified support for Triandis’s (1995) proposal
(H1; see also Kim & Markus, 1999), in that the affective impor-
tance of distinctiveness appeared to be stronger among individu-
als— but not among cultures—with more individualistic values.12

However, this effect was not especially large, and we found no
corresponding effect on the importance of distinctiveness in iden-
tity construction or when cultural orientation was measured in
terms of beliefs rather than values.

More crucially, we found no such effect at the cultural level of
analysis. At this level, contrary to H1, the distinctiveness motive
appeared to be stronger among members of collectivistic rather
than individualistic cultures (H2; after Brewer & Roccas, 2001).
Although the effect sizes were still relatively small, the trend was
in the same direction across all four tests that we conducted—
predicting both perceived centrality and identity-related affect, and
with both operational definitions of individualism– collectivism—
and it reached at least marginal significance in three out of four
tests. This clearly contradicts the prevailing relativist view on how
culture influences identity motives—the idea that identity motives
are internalized manifestations of cultural beliefs and values
(Breakwell, 1987; Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999;
Triandis, 1995). Instead, these results arguably add support to an
“oppositional view,” proposing that individuals develop stronger
motives for those needs that their cultural environment fails to
satisfy (Brewer & Roccas, 2001; Lo et al., 2011). Our evidence
suggests that members of more collectivistic cultures—where
there is a greater focus on conformity—may have a slightly stron-
ger motive for distinctiveness than do members of more individ-
ualistic cultures (although in the next section we consider an
alternative possible explanation of these findings).

Notably, the stronger association of distinctiveness with positive
affect in more collectivistic cultures argues against an alternative
explanation of our findings—that perhaps distinctive aspects of
identity would have become especially salient to members of
collectivistic cultures precisely because of their inconsistency with
cultural values, leading to feelings of social discomfort and shame,
and perhaps rumination about these undesired parts of identity.13

Had this been the case, participants in more collectivistic nations
might still have perceived the more distinctive aspects of their
identities as especially central—as we found here— but they surely
would have associated them with less rather than more positive
affect. Instead, we found that the moderating effect of culture was
actually much stronger for predictions of positive affect than it
was for predictions of perceived centrality: In fact, when culture
was operationalized in terms of values, participants from the most
collectivistic cultures in our sample showed a positive relationship
between distinctiveness and positive affect that was almost twice
as strong as that shown in the most individualistic cultures.

It also does not appear likely to us that the importance of
distinctiveness in our collectivistic samples can be reduced to a
question of demand characteristics. We took great care to avoid
demand characteristics when designing the study. To avoid prim-
ing a Western, individualistic conception of self-hood, we devel-
oped a culturally decentered alternative to the TST to generate
identity content for the current study, making the nature of the task
more concrete and contextualized, and emphasizing that relational

and collective as well as personal identity aspects were valid
answers. To avoid priming the importance of distinctiveness when
participants made their ratings of identity centrality and affect, we
placed these ratings before the distinctiveness ratings in the ques-
tionnaire, and we interspersed the four distinctiveness ratings
among 19 other ratings, so that even if participants looked ahead
in the questionnaire, our interest in distinctiveness would not have
been easily detected. Even if one imagines that these attempts were
not 100% successful, it remains unclear how stable demand char-
acteristics in our study design could have affected our cultural
samples differentially to produce the pattern of results we found
here.

Sources of Distinctiveness Across Cultures

Beyond questions about the strength of the distinctiveness mo-
tive across cultures, an important goal of our study was to test
whether ways of satisfying this motive would vary across cultures.
Based on Vignoles et al.’s (2000) predictions, we expected differ-
ence, social position, and separateness to be three alternative ways
of constructing a sense of distinctiveness and that people would
tend to achieve satisfaction of the distinctiveness motive in ways
that best fitted their cultural meaning systems. More precisely,
Vignoles et al. (2000; Vignoles, 2009) proposed that difference
and separateness would be more available, accessible, and valued
in individualistic cultures, whereas social position would be more
so in collectivistic cultures.

Our results support Vignoles et al.’s (2000) theoretical model of
difference, social position, and separateness as alternative ways of
constructing a general feeling of distinctiveness, with all three
sources emerging as significant predictors of the extent to which
participants viewed aspects of their identities as distinguishing
them from others. On average across our cultural samples, differ-
ence was found to be the strongest source of distinctiveness. This

(SANU; Lynn & Snyder, 2002), an explicit, self-report measure of the
“need” for distinctiveness. We used scores from the SANU as a dependent
variable in an additional set of analyses. Results showed that individuals
with stronger openness (vs. conservation) values reported that they had a
stronger NFU (B � .09, p � .001), whereas there was no effect of
culture-level values. No individual- or culture-level moderation effects
were found of contextualism beliefs on SANU scores. Thus, in contrast
with our more subtle and indirect approach to measuring identity motives,
differences in individuals’ self-reports of their need for distinctiveness
appear to depend on how much an individual values distinctiveness, but
they are seemingly not influenced directly by group-level values or beliefs.
This additional set of analyses show how results largely differ depending
on the explicit versus more indirect character of the scale used to measure
distinctiveness. For reasons outlined earlier in this article (based on
Vignoles, 2009, 2011), we believe that an indirect measure is a more valid
indicator of underlying identity motives.

12 An additional analysis revealed that this individual-level moderation
effect was only found when controlling for the opposing culture-level
moderation. Hence, it should be interpreted as an effect of individuals’
relative positions on the value scale within their respective cultural groups,
not their absolute positions, as H1 would predict. In contrast, the corre-
sponding culture-level moderation effect was found irrespective of whether
or not we controlled for the individual-level moderation.

13 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer of a previous version of
this article for suggesting this possibility.

848 BECKER ET AL.

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is in line with the focus in the psychological literature on differ-
ence as a source of distinctiveness (e.g., Lynn & Snyder, 2002),
although it may also reflect the relatively young age of our sam-
ple—which is also true of the samples of college students that have
participated in many previous studies of distinctiveness-seeking.
More crucially, in support of Vignoles et al.’s predictions, cultural
orientation moderated how distinctiveness was achieved: Whereas
people in more individualistic cultures tended to construct distinc-
tiveness more in terms of difference (H4), people in more collec-
tivistic cultures tended to construct distinctiveness more in terms
of social position (H6). These findings were observed with both
values-based and beliefs-based measures of cultural orientation.

The findings regarding separateness as a source of distinctive-
ness were somewhat more complex, although they were also
broadly in line with the predicted pattern. Overall, separateness
was a much weaker source of distinctiveness than difference and
social position. One possible speculation is that separateness may
become more important at later stages in life and that the young
age of the present sample explains the relatively small contribution
of separateness as a source of distinctiveness. Only partially sup-
porting H5, we found that the importance of separateness as a way
of achieving a sense of distinctiveness was higher in cultures with
more individualistic values and among participants from richer
nations, whereas it did not vary with contextualism beliefs. The
latter result does not support Vignoles et al.’s (2000) hypothesis
that beliefs about personhood would predict the extent to which
separateness is used as a way to achieve a sense of distinctiveness.
Rather, it appears that it is in richer nations, and where indepen-
dence is not just believed in but valued, that people start to use
separateness as a basis for identity construction. These results also
support arguments against a monolithic view of individualism–
collectivism; they show that it is important to measure diverse
facets of individualism– collectivism rather than assuming that
each facet will show the same pattern of effects (see Owe et al., in
press).

Notably, the fact that distinctiveness is constructed differently in
different cultural contexts may provide an alternative explanation
of our finding that distinctiveness had a more positive affective
significance in collectivistic cultures. If different cultures provide
different ways of satisfying this motive, then there is no reason to
assume—as Brewer and Roccas (2001) do—that some cultures
will be more likely to frustrate the distinctiveness motive. From
our perspective, some forms of distinctiveness (i.e., difference,
separateness) may be less available in collectivistic cultures, but
other forms of distinctiveness (i.e., social position) will be more
so. Thus, there is no particular reason to expect that the distinc-
tiveness motive will be chronically more aroused in collectivistic
cultures.

Rather than trying to explain why distinctiveness was a stronger
predictor of positive affect in collectivistic cultures, we suggest
that it may be more productive to ask why distinctiveness was a
weaker predictor of positive affect in individualistic cultures. One
important difference among the three sources of distinctiveness in
our model is that they are likely to be differentially satisfying to
other identity motives—particularly the motive for belonging, as
one would expect this to be frustrated by identity aspects that
separate one from others, but satisfied by identity aspects that give
one a clear social position (Becker et al., 2011; Vignoles et al.,
2000). We believe that participants in individualistic cultures may

have been more affectively ambivalent about distinctiveness be-
cause they were basing their distinctiveness to a greater extent on
characteristics that would probably have undermined satisfaction
of the motive for belonging—and feelings of belonging are an
important source of positive affect.

Distinctiveness and Levels of Universality

So, is the motive for distinctiveness a psychological universal?
Norenzayan and Heine (2005) have presented a framework of
different levels of universality ranging from non-universals, which
are pure cultural inventions, to “accessibility universals,” for
which there is strictly no cultural variability. In between these two
extremes, we suggest that the motive for distinctiveness can be
described as a “functional universal”; it is used in the same way
across cultures—it serves as a guide to identity construction pro-
cesses— even if the size of this effect may be subject to cultural
variation—slightly stronger, if anything, in more collectivistic
cultures. This indeed speaks in favor of a universalist view on
distinctiveness and, by extension, on identity motives in general
(see also Brewer, 1991; Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003;
Vignoles, 2011).

Nonetheless, over and above this universal quality of the under-
lying motive for distinctiveness, we have observed systematic
cultural variation in the ways in which the motive is satisfied. This
illustrates the importance of concentrating on the right level of
abstraction to discover universal psychological principles (Ken-
rick, Nieuweboer, & Buunk, 2010; Norenzayan & Heine, 2005).
More precisely, it supports Vignoles’s (2009, 2011) portrayal of
identity motives—including the distinctiveness motive—as “cul-
turally flexible universals.” He argues that people in all cultures
are guided by a common set of underlying identity motives (thus,
they are universal) but that cultural groups will develop different,
culturally attuned ways of satisfying the motives (thus, they are
flexible). In this way, the same underlying motive can have very
different consequences in different cultural environments, leading
to important cross-cultural variation in the outcomes of identity
processes. A similar view has been introduced by Kenrick et al.
(2010) with their metaphor of the human mind as a coloring
book—the outlines of the book being there from the start but
cultural norms defining the particular colors drawn inside these
outlines. The rationale of culturally flexible universals could be
extended to other identity motives as well; some research on
self-esteem (e.g., Sedikides et al., 2003) and continuity (e.g.,
Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003) is already taking a
similar route.

Considering Culture on Multiple Levels of Analysis

To take culture into account when studying psychological pro-
cesses is not a straightforward task. To date, much cross-cultural
research consists in describing psychological differences between
samples of two or more different nationalities—which, although
not representative samples, are typically assumed to reflect some
posited national profile in terms of culture—and speculating on
possible explanations of this variation (Bond, 2009). We used a
more theoretically driven approach to studying psychological pro-
cesses across cultures.

849CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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er
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se
o
f t
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in
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r a
nd
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to
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e
di
ss
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in
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ed
b
ro
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ly
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We measured cultural orientations in a larger number of nations
and used both individual scores and group-level means of contin-
uous measures of culture as moderators in our analyses. This has
two obvious advantages over the common approach of two-nation
comparisons. First, by measuring cultural orientation, we avoid
treating samples as reflecting national cultural profiles and, in-
stead, acknowledge their non-representative and more specific
character. Second, our multilevel approach to culture makes it
possible to test whether it is the “climate” of values and beliefs that
prevails in a given context or the individual cultural member’s
personal internalization of those values and beliefs that makes the
difference. Many studies do measure cultural orientations, but they
are confined by sampling limitations to examining individual-level
mediation, thus presupposing that culture has its effects through a
process of individual internalization. A multilevel methodology
involving many cultural groups is necessary to distinguish effects
of cultural orientation on individual and contextual levels of anal-
ysis. Thus, our study enables an actual test of explanations of
cultural variation in terms of dimensions of psychological culture.

Although our data analytic strategy equally allowed finding
individual-level and cultural-level effects, stronger moderation
effects were observed at the cultural level of analysis, with the
individual-level effects in most cases being vanishingly small. In
other words, while controlling for any potential effects of individ-
ual differences in values or beliefs, it was found that the mean
values and beliefs of each specific cultural sample had an effect on
how distinctiveness was constructed by the individuals within that
cultural group. Even in the case of values, for which it would be
expected that individuals’ priorities largely reflect and internalize
the prevalent cultural values of the environment they are raised in
(Schwartz & Bardi, 2001), results show that it is mainly a cultural
level of analysis that carries explanatory power over these pro-
cesses. Thus, the differences we found in ways of constructing a
sense of distinctiveness cannot be attributed to individuals’ inter-
nalization of cultural beliefs and values—instead, they appeared to
be effects of living in a particular cultural context where certain
things are believed and valued.14

This raises interesting questions about the processes that may be
underlying these contextual effects on the construction of individ-
ual identities. One possibility, suggested by the recently emerging
intersubjective culture perspective (Chiu, Gelfand, Yamagishi,
Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010), is that others’ beliefs and values may
have influenced identity construction through individuals’ percep-
tions of what is normatively believed and valued in their cultural
contexts. According to Chiu et al. (2010), perceived cultural norms
have an important psychological impact over and above individ-
uals’ personal beliefs and values for a variety of reasons: because
consensual ideas are interpreted as correct and natural, because
social identification with a given cultural group will lead individ-
uals to embrace the group’s norms, and as a result of social
accountability to others. Although these predictions have been
well-supported across a growing number of studies, we are not
convinced that intersubjective perceptions will prove to be the
mechanism explaining our current findings. Crucially, numerous
studies reviewed by Chiu et al. have shown that the intersubjective
perceptions of others’ beliefs and values that form the main focus
of the intersubjective culture approach frequently do not corre-
spond with actual variation in others’ beliefs and values—which
provided the moderation effects in our study.

Moreover, researchers so far have usually measured these inter-
subjective perceptions at an individual level of analysis—in other
words, individuals may differ in their perceptions of the same
cultural environment, and it is through individual-level psycholog-
ical mechanisms leading to individual-level responses that these
perceptions are expected to account for differences both within and
across groups. In contrast, the effects that we found were located
at the cultural level of analysis, explaining differences in identity
construction across cultural groups but not within groups. This
suggests that our results might be explained better by an approach
that focuses on the emergent properties of cultures as social
systems rather than one that focuses on cultures as targets of
individual perceptions.

One such systemic approach is the niche construction approach
to culture described by Yamagishi (2010). This perspective (for-
merly known as the institutional approach to culture) suggests that
we might understand the different constructions of distinctiveness
observed here as aspects of social institutions or niches—self-
sustaining systems of shared beliefs, incentives, and social prac-
tices. In social systems where people’s values are focused on
obligations toward others and where a contextualized concept of
the person prevails, an individual’s everyday life and the incen-
tives surrounding his or her actions will be strongly organized
around aspects of their social position—whatever their personal
beliefs and values—and hence, in such contexts, it may be rela-
tively adaptive to place a greater emphasis on such aspects when
thinking about who one is in relation to others. In contrast,
in social systems where people’s values are focused on self-
direction and autonomy and where a decontextualized concept of
the person prevails, an individual’s daily experiences and incen-
tives will be focused to a greater extent on his or her personal
characteristics and preferences, and so in these contexts, it may be
adaptive to focus to a greater extent on differences in personal
characteristics when thinking about one’s identity.

14 We should acknowledge that our capacity to detect individual-level
effects may have been weakened somewhat by the mediocre individual-
level reliabilities of our measures in some samples (see Footnote 3). This
would likely have reduced the size of the effects that we were able to
observe at the individual level, resulting in some loss of statistical power
on this level of analysis, and reducing somewhat our ability to control for
the potential confounding influence of aggregated individual-level moder-
ation effects when testing the culture-level moderation effects. Yet, most of
the individual-level moderation effects were so small that they failed to
reach significance even with a sample size of 4,751 individuals—indeed,
many of the these effects were estimated at exactly .00. Although lower
reliabilities might weaken these effects, they would not be expected to
eliminate them entirely given that we had a sufficient sample size to detect
even very small effects. We should also emphasize that not only were the
effect sizes different at the two levels of analysis but the actual pattern of
findings was different. Thus, even if the true individual-level moderation
effects were substantially stronger than those reported here, aggregating
these effects to the cultural level still could not account for the pattern of
culture-level effects observed here. Hence, we are confident that our results
truly represent effects of living within a particular cultural context—
independent of one’s personal, internalized values and beliefs—and that
they are not simply artifacts of the differential reliability of our measures
across the levels of analysis.

850 BECKER ET AL.

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Limitations and Future Directions

We should note several limitations of the current study. First,
our findings are based on cross-sectional data, and so we cannot be
certain about the causal direction of our findings. Although Vi-
gnoles et al. (2006) have previously provided longitudinal evi-
dence for the causal role of the distinctiveness motive in identity
construction, the focus of the current study was on the magnitude
of the observed relationships, not their causal direction.

Second, our participants were mostly high school students, and
thus the results may not generalize to older and/or less advantaged
groups. Although high school students are likely to be more
diverse in terms of socioeconomic status and ethnic diversity than
university students, they are still a selective group, especially in
some nations. Moreover, in the sample from the Philippines, which
was the second poorest nation in the study, participants were in
fact university students. Thus, in this nation in particular, it is
likely that our participants were from more advantaged social
groups. In terms of age, one might expect that emphases in identity
construction would change according to life stage (e.g., Erikson,
1980), and thus we should be cautious about generalizing the
present results to other age groups. In an ongoing study, we are
currently collecting data from an adult sample, which should
enable us to examine how the distinctiveness motive operates and
is satisfied among adults in diverse cultural contexts.

Third, with a multilevel approach to data analysis, it is important
to consider sample sizes on each level of analysis. Although the
number of participants in this study was high, our Level 3 sample
size was relatively low (21 cultural samples). So far, there is no
consensus in the literature regarding power calculations for mul-
tilevel modeling, but it has been suggested that around 20 samples
provide sufficient power to detect cross-level interactions in mul-
tilevel analysis (Kreft & de Leeuw, 1998). Indeed, Maas and Hox
(2005) concluded from their two-level simulation study that, even
for relatively small Level 2 sample sizes, estimates of regression
coefficients, standard errors of the latter, and variance components
appear to be accurate. In the case of the present study, low
statistical power did not seem to be a problem, as most of our
hypothesis tests yielded clear results based on conventional criteria
of statistical significance. Still, our findings included one margin-
ally significant result, relating to whether culture-level contextu-
alism beliefs moderate the importance of the distinctiveness as a
predictor of perceived centrality. Hence, it will be valuable to test
whether this result is replicated in future research involving a
larger sample of cultural groups.

In future research, it would also be desirable to collect data on
intersubjective perceptions of cultural beliefs and values in addi-
tion to participants’ own beliefs and values. This would allow us
to evaluate to what extent the contextual moderation effects that
we observed here are mediated by individuals’ perceptions of
cultural norms, as suggested by the intersubjective culture ap-
proach, or to what extent they may be better explained by macro-
level, systemic processes. Additionally, it will be important to
examine to what extent a similar approach can be applied to other
identity motives. According to MICT (Vignoles, 2011; Vignoles,
Manzi, Regalia, Jemmolo, & Scabini, 2008; Vignoles et al., 2006),
the distinctiveness motive is just one of at least six motives that
guide the processes shaping identity, and each of the other five
motives is predicted to function similarly as a “culturally flexible

universal.” Further analyses from the current study, and from our
ongoing study among adults, will test to what extent motives for
self-esteem, continuity, belonging, efficacy, and meaning general-
ize across cultures with differing values and beliefs, as well as the
routes to motive satisfaction that different cultures provide for
some of these other motives.

To conclude, the current study demonstrates the importance of
attending to the multifaceted nature of distinctiveness-seeking and
of taking cultural context into account when investigating the
operation of the distinctiveness motive. In particular, the results
show how, within any given cultural context, individuals construct
their sense of distinctiveness in culturally appropriate ways. In line
with the idea of “universalism without the uniformity” (Shweder &
Sullivan, 1993), it seems that people across the world seek the
same thing, only in different ways.

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Appendix A

Zero-Order Correlations Between Ratings of Identity Aspects (N � 51,580) for
Perceived Centrality, Positive Affect, General Distinctiveness, Difference,

Separateness, and Social Position

Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6

1. Perceived centrality — .46 .33 .29 .05 .35
2. Positive affect .48 — .26 .29 �.08 .43
3. General distinctiveness .36 .29 — .45 .17 .31
4. Difference .30 .29 .50 — .20 .43
5. Separateness .09 �.02 .21 .28 — .09
6. Social position .35 .41 .39 .53 .22 —

Note. Values below the diagonal use raw ratings, and values above the diagonal use participant mean-centered
values. All coefficients are significant at p � .001.

Appendix B

Zero-Order Correlations Between Individual-Level Variables (N � 5,158)

Variable 1 2 3 4

1. Openness (vs. Conservation) values —
2. Contextualism beliefs �.16��� —
3. Gendera �.06��� .04�� —
4. Subjective wealth .06��� �.02 .05��� —

a Dummy coded as �1 � female, 1 � male.
�� p � .01. ��� p � .001.

Appendix C

Zero-Order Correlations Between Culture-Level Variables (N � 21)

Variable 1 2 3

1. Openness (vs. Conservation) values —
2. Contextualism beliefs �.49� —
3. GNI per capita .37 �.26 —

Note. GNI per capita � gross national income per capita in U.S. dollars.
� p � .05.

Received September 16, 2010
Revision received August 16, 2011

Accepted September 23, 2011 �

855CULTURE AND THE DISTINCTIVENESS MOTIVE

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