Who Is Your Biggest Critic? Cultural Variation in Moral Judgments of the Self and Others

Abstract

People are motivated to punish others who commit immoral actions when they believe the person willingly committed such an act. Compared with European American individuals, East Asian individuals are more punitive of wrongdoings, yet are less likely to attribute actions to the person. Here, we drew on research in cultural psychology to test the prediction that Chinese individuals are more punitive in part because they are more self-critical than European American individuals. This prediction would imply that cultural differences in punishment are most pronounced in judgments of oneself (vs. others) and largely driven by a difference in self-enhancement motives. To test this prediction, we conducted two studies, where 1,563 participants imagined immoral (vs. moral) actions performed by themselves or others. We then measured self-enhancement (how much participants perceived the immoral act impacts self-esteem) and attributions (how much participants perceived the immoral act is due to the person). As predicted, Chinese individuals punished immoral behavior more than European American individuals, which was explained by Chinese individuals being less self-enhancing, as indicated by a greater perception that immoral actions will negatively impact their self-esteem. Dispositional attributions predicted punishment regardless of culture. This work highlights how cultural differences in self-enhancement are key to understanding moral judgments and their cultural variation.

Keywords

morality culture self-enhancement dispositional bias

Introduction

People are motivated to punish others who commit immoral actions when they believe the person willingly and freely committed such an act (Clark et al., 2014; Cushman, 2015; Shariff et al., 2014). Importantly, there is cultural variation in punishment such that Chinese individuals are typically more punitive of immoral actions than European American individuals (Feinberg et al., 2019). Research suggests that Chinese may focus less on making attributions of the immoral act and instead focus on the societal harm of the action (Feinberg et al., 2019). However, this alone may not fully capture why there is a cultural difference in punishment. Here, we suggest that one important reason cultural differences in punishment arise is because Chinese individuals are more self-critical or less self-enhancing than European American individuals (Heine et al., 1999; Kitayama et al., 1997; Salvador et al., 2022). We test two implications for this prediction. First, the cultural differences in punishment should be explained in part by a difference in self-enhancement rather than attributions. Second, the cultural difference in moral judgments should be more pronounced for the self than others. These moral judgments should be evident in both the moral evaluation of the event (measured by how impactful the event is perceived to be to self-esteem and whether the event is attributed to the self or others) and the moral punishment (measured by how much people want to punish the individual). Together, this work provides novel insights into the moral psychology of punishment and expands the cultural psychology literature by showing whether cultural differences in self-enhancement have implications for moral judgments.

Existing Accounts About Why People Punish

Past research shows there are cultural differences in punishment, such that samples of Chinese undergraduates and online participants tend to punish immoral actions more severely than samples of American undergraduates and online participants (Feinberg et al., 2019). Existing research suggests that people punish immoral behavior most harshly when they attribute it to the perpetrator’s dispositions, such as when the actor freely chose to intentionally cause harm (Clark et al., 2014, 2021; Cushman, 2015; Malle, 2006; Shariff et al., 2014). Importantly, there are reliable cross-cultural differences in attributional styles, such that European American individuals tend to make dispositional attributions much more than East Asian individuals, who are more likely to also attend to external, situational factors (Kitayama et al., 2009; Morris & Peng, 1994; Norenzayan et al., 2002). These past findings make contradictory predictions about the cultural differences in moral punishment: How can Chinese individuals punish more than American individuals if they show a weaker dispositional bias? Feinberg et al. (2019) suggested that the link between dispositional bias and punishment is weaker among Chinese individuals, but Chinese individuals punish more than American individuals because they are instead sensitive to the negative social impact of immoral behavior (Feinberg et al., 2019). We tested this possibility here by examining how much people attribute immoral behaviors to dispositions, and whether dispositional attributions predict punishment the same or differently across cultures.

Self-Enhancement and Self-Serving Biases

When the perpetrator of the immoral act is the self, self-serving biases also become part of the story (Stanley & De Brigard, 2019). Decades of research in social psychology has documented that people in Western cultural contexts hold overly positive views of themselves, which they are motivated to maintain (Heine et al., 1999; Taylor & Brown, 1988). For example, European American individuals tend to view positive outcomes as consistent with the self-concept and readily attribute them to their personality (Jones & Nisbett, 1987). They also perceive they have more opportunities and act in accordance to their desires than do others (Pronin & Kugler, 2010). Importantly, these attributional biases reverse when the outcome of the situation is negative. European American participants tend to attribute their own negative outcomes to external factors, and other people’s negative outcomes to internal factors (Malle, 2006). Recent research also shows self-serving biases in judgments of morality (Stanley & De Brigard, 2019). For example, people believe that their true self is more moral than the true selves of other people (Zhang & Alicke, 2021); they exhibit self-enhancing biases in their memories of their past immoral actions (Stanley et al., 2018), and judge their own immoral actions as less wrong than those of others (Stanley et al., 2017).

Although there is some debate on cultural variation in self-enhancement biases (see Heine, 2005; Heine et al., 2007; Sedikides et al., 2003), meta-analyses suggest that while self-serving biases are widespread and robust in European American cultural contexts, this bias is attenuated in East Asian cultural contexts (Heine & Hamamura, 2007). In a seminal study, Kitayama and colleagues (1997) asked Japanese and European Americans college undergraduates to rate how their self-esteem would be influenced by 400 situations. Consistent with the idea that Westerners are motivated to maintain positive self-views, European American students said that their self-esteem would be influenced more by their successes than by their failures. Conversely, Japanese students showed the opposite tendency and reported that failures would influence their self-esteem more than successes (Kitayama et al., 1997; an effect also documented in Taiwan, Salvador et al., 2022). This work suggests that one reliable measure of self-enhancement, and its associated cultural variation is in how much a given situation impacts self-esteem. We adopted this measure in the present work as an index of self-enhancement, to test the novel prediction that immoral actions that are judged to have a greater negative impact on self-esteem will be judged to deserve greater punishment.

Importantly, the relation between the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem and punishment may be strongest when evaluating one’s own actions, but may also be projected onto other people. Moreover, as Chinese individuals show less self-serving bias, they would perceive immoral actions as negatively influencing their self-esteem more, and therefore punish themselves more than European American individuals. The assessment of the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem provides a novel contribution to the moral psychology literature, which has largely focused on cognitive attributions rather than how a situation impacts the self as an explanation for punishment.

Present Study

In the present work, we first aimed to replicate the pattern that Chinese individuals would punish immoral actions more than American individuals. We then tested whether Chinese participants’ greater punitiveness was predicted by (a) a dispositional attribution for the wrongdoer’s behavior and (b) self-enhancement as indicated by a stronger perceived negative impact of the immoral behavior on self-esteem. First, we tested how much people attribute immoral behaviors to dispositions given past work that dispositional attributions reliably predict harsher punishment (Malle, 2006). We also sought to test whether dispositional attributions predict punishment more in some cultures than others (Feinberg et al., 2019) and whether there are differences for transgressions committed by the self and by others. Second, we examined the role of self-enhancement, with the prediction that people who expect that the immoral action would more negatively impact their self-esteem would punish more. While we expected this effect to be largest in judgments of the self, we also examined whether the effect extended to judgments of others. In addition to examining whether there is an effect of self-enhancement on moral judgments, we tested cultural variation. We predicted that compared with European American individuals, Chinese individuals would perceive that their own and others’ self-esteem would be more negatively influenced by immoral actions, thereby revealing that self-enhancement motives, in addition to attributions, are important to understanding cross-cultural variation in moral punishment judgments.

Study 1

Methods

Participants

A power analysis showed that with 787 participants, we would be able to detect a small effect (f = .1) with two groups, two levels of variables at 80% power, and an alpha threshold of .05. We thus rounded up and set a preregistered target sample size of 400 European Americans from the United States (recruited through Prolific, with self-identified European American/Caucasian ancestry) and 400 Chinese in China (recruited through Credamo, who had never been to a European Country). We excluded 13 inattentive participants, for a final sample of 391 European American and 393 Chinese participants. The European American group included 197 males, 190 females, and four who did not report their gender, who varied from 18 to 81 years of age (M = 45.02, SD = 15.17). The Chinese descent group included 133 males, 260 females, who varied from 18 to 57 years of age (M = 30.75, SD = 8.27). Study 1 was preregistered at https://osf.io/pq6my/. These studies were overseen by the Duke University Campus IRB, Protocol #2022-0515. Prior to running these studies, we conducted two pilot studies to test the attribution measure in a European American (Pilot Study 1) and European American and Chinese sample (Pilot Study 2). Details of these studies are available at https://osf.io/sfd6u/. Materials for the European American samples were administered in English. For our Chinese samples, we had a researcher who is bilingual and fluent in both Chinese and English translate the materials. Then, separate research assistants conducted a backtranslation. The group discussed any discrepancies and adjusted the materials to ensure equivalence of meaning.

Procedure

Participants first filled out a robot check, consent form, and committed to answering open-ended questions with a complete sentence. They were told that during this study they would try to predict one’s own and others’ behaviors in a variety of situations. They were first shown an analogy in which an outcome (the price of corn) could be predicted by various factors (the state of the economy, availability of other grains, and the yield of corn that season). Then, they were presented with six scenarios in a random order (Table 1) adapted from a set of everyday immoral actions (Lovett et al., 2012) that included both acts of omission and commission, and include acts of both prescriptive and proscriptive morality (Janoff-Bulman et al., 2009) to include a diversity of scenarios. Our pretest showed that, on average, people reported engaging in these actions “at least once before.” The design was fully between subjects to avoid any possible influences of a scenario from a different condition. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, where they were asked to imagine themselves or a hypothetical stranger engaging in either a moral or an immoral behavior. We ran two robustness checks. First, there were two scenarios (failing to give to someone in need and failing to offer a seat on the bus) that our pilot data suggested did not differ in how wrong the action was perceived by Chinese and American participants. We ran the main analyses with only these scenarios and largely replicated the main results (pages 7–9 of the Supplemental Information). Second, we included in the analyses whether the transgressions were an act of omission (failing to give to someone in need, failing to carry out your responsibilities on a project at work, failing to offer your seat on a bus to an elderly or disabled individual, failing to help a friend) versus commission (lying to cover a mistake that you made, taking credit for something good you did not do) as an additional independent variable. We ran the main analyses with this additional independent variable replicated the main results (pages 9–10 of the Supplemental Information).

Table 1.

Behaviors Used in the Present Study for the Immoral Behavior (A) and Moral Behavior (B) Conditions.

A. Immoral behavior	B. Moral behavior
1. Failing to give to someone in need	1. Giving to someone in need
2. Failing to carry out your responsibilities on a project at work	2. Carrying out your responsibilities on a project at work
3. Failing to offer your seat on a bus to an elderly or disabled individual	3. Offering your seat on a bus to an elderly or disabled individual
4. Failing to help a friend	4. Helping a friend
5. Lying to cover a mistake that you made	5. Telling the truth about a mistake that you made
6. Taking credit for something good you did not do	6. Doing something good without taking any credit

After imagining and writing about the scenario, they indicated how much the outcome of the event could be explained by the situation, the protagonist’s personality, the protagonist’s desires/intentions, and the protagonist’s past behavior (adapted from Pronin & Kugler, 2010). The total of all four attributes added up to 100%. This was programmed into the Qualtrics survey, so participants could not proceed until their judgments added up to 100%. We computed the difference between the attribution of behavior to the person (personality, intentions, or past behavior) as opposed to the situation to create a single index of dispositional bias.

Participants then reported whether this situation would influence their or another person’s self-esteem (yes or no). If they said self-esteem would be influenced, they were then asked whether the situation would make their self-esteem go up or down, and by how much (adapted from Kitayama et al., 1997). As in Kitayama et al. (1997), we transformed the measure to one of changes in self-esteem ranging from –4 to 4, consistent with the positivity/negativity of the action. Higher scores reflect greater decreases in self-esteem in the immoral behavior condition and greater increases in self-esteem in the moral behavior condition, such that scores reflect the impact on self-esteem consistent with action valence and allow us to directly compare the impact of positive and negative actions on self-esteem. Our perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem is distinct from Feinberg and colleagues (2019) measure of the perceived societal impact of an immoral action. This is because participants are being asked to what extent their self-esteem is influenced (in the self condition) or to what extent another person’s self-esteem is influenced (in the other condition), rather than how the action impacts society.

Participants in the immoral condition completed the punishment measure. Specifically, they were to indicate their level of agreement with four statements (e.g., “I [John] should pay for my [his] actions,” α ranged from .83 to .91 for Chinese participants and from .86 to .95 for European American participants) on a 5-point rating scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). Finally, they were asked to indicate whether the situation they were asked to imagine had ever occurred to them or a stranger (Yes/No). We conducted a supplementary analysis from participants who reported that all events had occurred in their lives (see Supplemental Information pages 5–10). After answering the main questions for each of the six scenarios, participants completed a measure of Impression Management (α was .91 for Chinese participants and .82 for European American participants; Blasberg et al., 2014) and provided their demographic characteristics. In these studies, we report all measures, manipulations, and exclusions.

Results

Punishment

We first performed a regression model that predicted punishment (averaged across all six trials in the immoral condition) from Protagonist (centered, Self = 0.5, Other = –0.5) and Culture (centered, European = –0.5, Chinese = 0.5) and their interaction. As predicted, there was a significant main effect of Culture, b = 1.02 [0.89, 1.15], p < .001, showing that Chinese participants punished more than American participants (Supplemental Table S1). Consistent with research on self-serving biases in moral judgments, we also observed a main effect of Protagonist, b = 0.45 [0.32, 0.58], p < .001, such that participants desired more punishment for others than for oneself. As preregistered, these main effects were qualified by a significant interaction between Protagonist and Culture, b = –0.31 [–0.58, –0.05], p = .018: European American participants reported substantially more punishment for others (M = 2.33, SE = 0.06) compared with themselves (M = 1.72, SE = 0.06), b = 0.61 [0.42, 0.08], p < .001. Chinese participants also punished others (M = 3.19, SE = 0.06) more than themselves (M = 2.89, SE = 0.08), although the self-other difference was weaker but still significant, b = 0.30 [0.11, 0.48], p = .002. Among participants who reported the event occurred to them before, the Protagonist and Culture main effects replicated, although the Protagonist by Culture interaction became marginal (see Supplemental Table S2).

Attributions for Behavior

We computed the difference between the attribution of behavior to the person (personality, intentions, or past behavior) as opposed to the situation to create a single index of dispositional bias. We used a regression model to examine whether the dispositional bias score was predicted by the Condition (immoral or neutral), the Protagonist of the situation (self or other, centered), participants’ Culture (European American or Chinese, centered), and the interaction between the three. There were significant main effects of Protagonist, Culture, and Condition that were qualified by a significant two-way interaction between Protagonist and Condition, b = 19.32 [12.64, 26.01], p < .001, and three-way interaction between Protagonist, Culture, and Condition, b = –13.88 [–27.26, –0.51], p = .042 (Supplemental Table S3). Both the two-way and three-way interactions were preregistered. As expected, and shown in Figure 1A, compared with one’s own actions there was a greater tendency to attribute others’ actions to their dispositions, but this effect was much larger in the immoral condition, especially among European Americans, b = 28.24 [21.48, 35.01], compared with Chinese participants, b = 20.11 [13.46, 26.67], ps < .001. For moral actions, Chinese participants also attributed others’ actions to dispositions more than one’s own actions, b = 7.73 [1.03, 14.43], p = .024, whereas European American participants did not differ in their dispositional attributions to self and other, b = 1.98 [–4.65, 8.61], p = .56. Only the two-way Protagonist × Condition interaction replicated when we tested a subset of participants that reported the actions occurred to them (Supplemental Table S4).

Figure 1.

Dispositional Bias (A) and Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem (B) as a Function of the Protagonist of the Situation (Self or Other), Condition (Immoral or Neutral), and Culture (European American or Chinese).

Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem

Next, we used an analogous regression model to examine whether changes in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem differed by Condition, Protagonist, Culture (all centered), and their interactions. Contrary to our prediction, there was not a Protagonist-by-Condition interaction (Supplemental Table S3); instead, there was a significant Culture-by-Condition interaction, b = –0.84 [–1.14, –0.54], p < .001 (Figure 1B). Consistent with past work that East Asian individuals are more self-critical (Kitayama et al., 1997), Chinese participants perceived that their self-esteem would be impacted more by immoral versus moral actions, b = 0.27 [0.05, 0.48], p = .014. In contrast, European American participants showed the opposite pattern: They expected that moral actions would affect self-esteem more than immoral actions, b = –0.57 [–0.78, –0.36], p < .001. As a result, Chinese participants expected that immoral actions would impact their self-esteem significantly more than did Americans, b = 0.75 [0.54, 0.96], p < .001. This effect replicated among a subset of participants who reported the events had occurred to them (Supplemental Table S4). As preregistered, there was also a three-way interaction between Protagonist, Culture, and Condition, b = –0.76 [–1.36, –0.15], p = .014. This three-way interaction showed that the Culture–by-Condition interaction was especially strong in judgments of others. This interaction was only marginal among a subset of participants who reported the events had occurred to them (Supplemental Table S4). Importantly, the perceived impact on self-esteem scores was only weakly correlated with our measure of dispositional bias, r(782) = .11 [.04, .18], p = .002, suggesting they are capturing two distinct aspects of moral judgments.

Dispositional Attribution and Punishment

We examined the association between dispositional bias and punishment, using a regression model that predicted punishment from dispositional bias (standardized), Protagonist, Culture (both centered), and all interactions between these variables. Overall, as preregistered, there was a significant positive association between Dispositional Bias and Punishment, b = 0.15 [0.08, 0.22], p < .001 (Supplemental Table S5). Contrary to predictions, the Dispositional Bias-by-Protagonist interaction was not significant. Instead, a significant main effect of Protagonist, Culture, and an interaction between the two emerged: Culture-by-Protagonist interaction, b = –0.39 [–0.68, –0.10], p = .008. As depicted in Figure 2A, European American participants were significantly more likely to punish others than oneself, b = 0.55 [0.34, 1.14], whereas Chinese participants did not significantly differ in their punishment of self and others, b = 0.16 [–0.04, 0.35], p = .12. The relationship between dispositional bias and punishment was not significantly moderated by Protagonist, p = .14, or Culture, p = .40, nor was there a significant three-way dispositional bias by Protagonist-by-Culture interaction, p = .30. The Culture-by-Protagonist interaction did not replicate among a subset of participants who reported the events had occurred to them but did replicate after controlling for impression management (Supplemental Figure S1 and Supplemental Tables S5 and S6).

Figure 2.

The Relationship Between Dispositional Bias (A) or Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem (B) and Punishment for the Self-Judgment (Dark) and Other-Judgment (Light) Conditions.

Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem and Punishment

Using an analogous regression model with the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem as a predictor of punishment, we found that as preregistered, decreases in self-esteem predicted greater punishment, b = 0.22 [0.15, 0.29], p < .001. As depicted in Figure 2B, and as predicted, this relationship varied as a function of Protagonist, b = –0.16 [–0.31, –0.02], p = .031. However, the direction was opposite to what we had predicted, perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem was more predictive of punishment for oneself, b = 0.30 [0.20, 0.40], p < .001, than for others, b = 0.14 [0.03, 0.25], p = .013. The relationship also varied based on Culture, b = 0.15 [0.01, 0.30], p = .040: The perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem was more predictive of punishment among Chinese participants, b = 0.30 [0.22, 0.37], p < .001, than European American participants, b = 0.14 [0.02, 0.27], p = .028. All the reported effects held after controlling for impression management and among participants who reported the event happened to them in the past (Supplemental Figure S1 and Supplemental Tables S5 and S6).

Mediation

In the context of immoral behavior, Culture (Chinese participants > European American participants) predicted (a) greater punishment and (b) greater decreases in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem for immoral actions. While dispositional bias did predict higher punishment, it did not vary by Culture, so we did not test for mediation. We ran a mediation with PROCESS model 4 to test whether the effect of Culture (0 = European American participants, 1 = Chinese participants) on punishment is mediated by the perceived impact of the immoral behaviors to self-esteem. These mediators were entered simultaneously. As shown in Figure 3, we found that Culture (0 = European American participants, 1 = Chinese participants) predicted a greater negative impact of the situation on self-esteem, t(340) = 7.66, p < .001. The perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem indirectly predicted punishment, t(340) = 4.53, p < .001. This suggests that the cultural difference in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem can in part explain why Chinese participants punish more for immoral behavior, although the direct effect of Culture on punishment was still significant indicating remaining unexplained variance, t(340) = 10.02, p < .001. To test whether these effects differed based on the Protagonist of the action, we ran the same mediation with Protagonist as a moderator and found no evidence of a moderated mediation (see Supplemental Figure S2), suggesting the effect is similar for both the self and others.

Figure 3.

This Model Tests the Indirect Effect of Culture (0 = European Americans, 1 = China) on Punishment Through the Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem by Using a 95% Confidence Interval With 10,000 Bootstrapped Samples.

Discussion

In Study 1, we found that Chinese participants punish themselves and others more than European American participants. Chinese participants’ greater tendency to punish is in part explained by self-enhancement motives: Chinese participants perceived that immoral behavior would impact self-esteem more, whereas European American participants expected the opposite. While we did find that dispositional bias predicted punishment (replicating prior literature, Cushman, 2015; Shariff et al., 2014), dispositional bias was less relevant to cultural differences in punishment. This study highlights that self-enhancement, operationalized as the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem, is also vital to understanding patterns of moral judgments. To examine the robustness and replicability of these findings, we conducted an additional preregistered direct replication.

Study 2

Methods

We set a preregistered target sample size of 400 European American (from the United States) and 400 Chinese participants. Following the same preregistered and prescreening criteria as in Study 1, we excluded 35 inattentive participants, for a final sample of 392 European American and 387 Chinese participants. The European American group included 189 males, 191 females, and 12 who did not report their gender, who varied from 18 to 84 years of age (M = 41.58, SD = 14.3). The Chinese descent group included 132 males, 255 females, who varied from 19 to 62 years of age (M = 30.90, SD = 7.46). The European American participants were recruited through Prolific. Chinese participants were recruited through Credamo. They were screened to be Chinese and had never been to a European country. Study 2 was preregistered at: https://osf.io/35px9/. All analyses use the same analytic strategy of regressions that we employed in Study 1.

As in Study 1, we ran two robustness checks. First, we ran the main analyses with only the scenarios that did not differ in how wrong they were perceived by Chinese and American participants, and largely replicated the main results (pages 17–18 of the SI). Second, we included in the analyses whether the transgressions were an act of omission versus commission as an additional independent variable. We ran the main analyses with this additional independent variable, and they replicated the main results (pages 18–20 of the SI).

Results

Punishment

The Cronbach’s alpha ranged from .74 to .90 for Chinese participants and from .86 to.94 for European American participants. For impression management, alpha was .90 for Chinese participants and .81 for European American participants. As in Study 1 and as preregistered, there was a significant main effect of Culture, b = 0.90 [0.76, 1.03], p < .001, showing that Chinese participants punished more (M = 3.06, SE = 0.05) than European American participants (M = 2.15, SE = 0.06) (Supplemental Table S7). There was also a main effect of Protagonist, b = 0.55 [0.41, 0.68], p < .001, such that participants desired more punishment for others (M = 2.88, SE = 0.06) than for oneself (M = 2.31, SE = 0.06). However, unlike in Study 1 and contrary to predictions, there was no significant interaction between Protagonist and Culture, p = .19. These effects were no different among people who reported that the event had occurred to them in the past (Supplemental Table S8).

Attributions for Behavior

Unlike Study 1, there was no main effect of Culture on dispositional attributions, b = 1.67 [–3.14, 6.47], p = .50. However, replicating Study 1 and as preregistered, there was a significant interaction between Protagonist and Condition, b = 21.66 [14.82, 28.50], p < .001 (Supplemental Table S9). For immoral behaviors, others’ actions were attributed to dispositions significantly more often than one’s own actions, b = 26.35 [21.48, 31.22], p < .001. There was no significant difference between the Protagonist in the moral condition, b = 4.69 [–0.11, 9.49], p = .055. Neither of these effects were qualified by Culture, as shown by negligible Culture × Protagonist and Culture, Protagonist, and Condition interactions, p = .44. and p = .93, respectively (Figure 4A). These effects were no different among people who reported that the event had occurred to them in the past (Supplemental Table S10).

Figure 4.

Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem

As shown in Figure 4B, here was a significant main effect of Culture, b = 0.77 [0.56, 0.98], which was qualified by an interaction between Protagonist and Condition, b = 0.55 [0.36, 0.84] and Culture and Condition, b = –0.59 [–0.89, –0.30], ps < .001. Chinese participants expected that the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem would be greater for immoral versus moral actions, b = 0.23 [0.02, 0.43], p = .034. In contrast, European American participants expected that moral actions would affect self-esteem more than immoral actions, b = –0.37 [–0.57, –0.16], p = .001. As a result, Chinese participants expected that immoral actions would impact their self-esteem significantly more than did American participants, b = 0.77 [0.56, 0.98], p < .001. The Culture-by-Condition interaction was preregistered, replicates Study 1, and was robust after including only people who reported the event had occurred to them in the past (Supplemental Table S10), although contrary to predictions we did not observe a three-way interaction between Protagonist, Culture, and Condition. Dispositional attributions for events and the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem were not significantly correlated, r(777) = .05 [–.02, .12], p = .20.

Dispositional Attribution and Punishment

Figure 5A shows the association between dispositional bias and punishment. There was a main effect of dispositional bias on punishment, b = 0.13 [0.05, 0.20], p = .001. This effect of dispositional bias was not moderated by Culture, b = –0.11 [–0.25, 0.03], p = .13. The relationship between dispositional bias and punishment was moderated by Protagonist, b = 0.23 [0.09, 0.37], p = .001, such that dispositional bias predicted punishment of others, b = 0.24 [0.13, 0.35], p < .001, but did not predict punishment of oneself, b = 0.01 [–0.07, 0.09], p = .81. The three-way interaction between dispositional bias, Protagonist, and Culture was nonsignificant, p = .49. These findings are exactly as preregistered and replicate in supplemental analyses controlling for impression management and including people who reported the events occurring to them (Supplemental Figure S3 and Supplemental Tables S11 and S12).

Figure 5.

The Relationship Between Dispositional Attributions (A) the Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem (B) and Punishment for the Self-Judgment (Dark Blue) and Other-Judgment (Light Blue) Conditions.

Perceived Impact of the Situation on Self-Esteem and Punishment

Greater decreases in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem in the immoral behavior condition predicted greater punishment, b = 0.30 [0.22, 0.38], p < .001, but this relationship varied across Protagonist, b = –0.26 [–0.41, –0.10], p = .001, and Culture, b = 0.19 [0.04, 0.35], p = .013 (Figure 5B). The perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem was more predictive of punishment for oneself, b = 0.43 [0.33, 0.52], p < .001, than for others, b = 0.17 [0.05, 0.29], p = .005. The perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem was also more predictive of punishment among Chinese participants, b = 0.40 [0.31, 0.48], p < .001, than European American participants, b = 0.20 [0.07, 0.33], p < .001. The reported effects held after controlling for impression management and replicated in the sample of people who reported the event had occurred to them in the past (Supplemental Figure S3 and Supplemental Tables S11 and S12), although the three-way interaction between the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem, Culture, and Protagonist was non-significant.

Mediation

Previous analyses showed Culture (Chinese participants > European American participants) predicts greater punishment and greater decreases in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem in response to immoral behavior. Moreover, greater perceived negative impact of a situation to self-esteem predicted punishment. As shown in Figure 6, we found that Culture (0 = European Americans, 1 = China) predicted a greater negative impact of the situation on self-esteem, t(356) = 6.87, p < .001, which in turn predicted punishment, t(356) = 2.90, p = .004. While the direct effect of Culture on punishment was still significant, t(356) = 9.84, p < .001, there was a significant indirect effect of self-esteem. This suggests that the cultural difference in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem in part explains why Chinese participants punish more for immoral behavior. There was no effect of Condition or evidence of moderated mediation (Supplemental Figure S4).

Figure 6.

Discussion

We replicated several findings from Study 1. Chinese participants punish more than European American participants. Moreover, Chinese participants show a weaker self-enhancement bias than European American participants. Specifically, Chinese participants report that immoral actions tend to impact self-esteem more than moral actions. European American participants show the reverse: They think self-esteem will be impacted more by moral than immoral actions. Importantly, the cultural difference in the perceived impact of immoral behavior on self-esteem in part explains why Chinese participants punish more. This finding highlights the key role of self-enhancement and its associated cultural variation in explaining punishment for immoral acts. We also find evidence that dispositional biases in attributions predict greater punishment, although we found that this effect is moderated by protagonist (stronger in judgments of others), and not culture. These findings suggest that the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem, more so than attributions, may be crucial to understanding cultural variation in moral judgments. Dispositional attributions may predict punishment regardless of culture.

General Discussion

Why do Chinese individuals punish wrongdoings more than American individuals? The present work proposed that the cultural difference in punishment is partly explained by East Asian individuals showing a weaker self-enhancement bias than European American individuals (Kitayama et al., 1997; Salvador et al., 2022). Whereas our indicator of self-enhancement (the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem) predicted the cultural difference in punishment, dispositional attributions did not show clear cultural differences. Specifically, we found that Chinese individuals perceived that immoral actions would influence the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem more than moral actions, consistent with the notion that they are self-critical. In contrast, European American individuals were more self-enhancing and perceived that moral actions would influence the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem more than immoral actions. The cultural difference in the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem in part explained Chinese participants’ harsher punishment. These patterns were similar when the protagonist was the self or someone else, but slightly stronger in the self-judgment condition. Dispositional attributions also predicted punishment and this effect was a bit stronger for judgments of others. However, this relationship did not consistently differ between cultures, consistent with research indicating that cultural differences in dispositional biases may be less relevant to understanding cultural differences in moral punishment (Feinberg et al., 2019). This expands the literature on moral psychology by illuminating that self-enhancement motives are important to measure and critical to understand why people punish. Moreover, this research extends past cross-cultural research on self-enhancement by examining the domain of moral judgments.

The similar patterns for dispositional bias across cultures are surprising given that East Asian populations often show an attenuated dispositional bias (e.g., Kitayama et al., 2009; Morris & Peng, 1994; Norenzayan et al., 2002). In our studies, Chinese individuals were as willing (or even more willing in Study 1) as European American individuals to attribute actions to dispositions when explaining moral and immoral actions. In both cultures, dispositional attributions predicted greater willingness to punish, consistent with past literature documenting harsher punishment of intentional, freely chosen actions (Clark et al., 2014, 2021; Cushman, 2015; Shariff et al., 2014). This may suggest that attributions to dispositions may be a more culturally universal predictor of punishment. This conclusion is different from Feinberg et al. (2019). This difference may be partially attributable to the stimuli we used, which described an immoral behavior without providing additional contextual information. It is possible Chinese participants may only account for these situational influences when they are salient (Feinberg et al., 2019). Importantly, this research indicates that self-enhancement motives and attributions are distinct facets of moral judgments across cultures. Self-enhancement is a currently neglected but important factor in understanding moral judgments across cultures.

This research contributes to the research in cultural psychology. The idea that East Asian individuals are more self-critical than European American individuals has been highly influential in the field (Heine et al., 1999). While the evidence for an attenuated self-enhancement effect among East Asian individuals seems robust (Heine & Hamamura, 2007), the evidence for self-criticism is more sparse (see Chang & Asakawa, 2003; Kitayama et al., 1997; Salvador et al., 2022, for some exceptions). In our studies, Chinese individuals judged immoral actions as significantly more impactful to their self-esteem, whereas European American individuals showed the reverse pattern. These findings provide additional evidence that East Asian individuals tend to be more self-critical than European American individuals, using a conceptually related measure (i.e., impact of self-esteem to immoral vs. moral actions) and a distinct East Asian sample (i.e., Chinese instead of Japanese or Taiwanese).

This research also expands work examining cultural differences in self-enhancement. We conceptually replicated and extended past findings on cultural variation in self-enhancement (Kitayama et al., 1997; Salvador et al., 2022) to the domain of morality. In applying self-enhancement theory and the perceived impact on self-esteem measure to moral evaluations, we expected that people who are self-enhancers should be more impacted by positive moral behaviors and less impacted by negative immoral behaviors. This asymmetrical hypothesis makes the predictions from self-enhancement theory distinct from just perceiving an event is central or important to the moral self. According to research on moral identity centrality (Aquino & Reed, 2002), people who see being a moral person as an important part of their identity would be particularly attuned to moral information. This could mean that they have their self-esteem impacted more by both moral and immoral behaviors, a different hypothesis from self-enhancement theory. Our data showed support of self-enhancement theory which highlights the utility of this theory to understand morality as well as cultural variation.

Across both studies, the direct effect of culture on punishment was still significant even after we accounted for the effects of the perceived impact of the situation on self-esteem, indicating that other factors are also at play. For example, in our studies impression management also had a unique indirect effect: Chinese individuals are higher in impression management, which in part explains why they punish more (see Supplemental Information for details). Feinberg et al. (2019) showed that Chinese individuals were higher in Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), which in turn predicted a higher likelihood of punishing others. They also suggest that Chinese individuals may be more concerned with societal welfare, consistent with past work showing that Chinese individuals also tend to stick to close ingroups and value interdependence with others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Thomson et al., 2018). Finally, China is a tight culture, with strict norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (Chua et al., 2019). Future work can closely examine the role of each of these mechanisms in why Chinese individuals punish more. Nonetheless, our findings push the literature one clear step forward by showing that the cultural difference in moral judgments is in part driven by a cultural variation in self-enhancement, an understudied predictor of punishment.

A few limitations of the current work must be acknowledged. We relied on judgments of hypothetical scenarios, like much of the moral psychology literature. Future work is needed to examine whether and how these judgments influence social interactions in real time. Importantly, supporting the idea that our findings may have some external validity, when we reran the focal analysis for only people who had experienced the event in their life, the results were very similar. Second, we used “zi zun” as the translation for “self-esteem” in Chinese. Many measures (e.g., the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale) have used “zi zun” as the translation of self-esteem to Chinese for the purpose of cross-cultural comparisons. However, we acknowledge the nuanced differences between the English term “self-esteem” and its Chinese counterpart “zi zun” (e.g., Zhang et al., 2021). “Zi zun” underscores the idea of how much you respect yourself, whereas self-esteem underscores the subjective evaluation of yourself. Both are very similar, but future work is needed to examine different ways of referring to self-esteem and how those may impact moral judgments. Third, we report data on Chinese and European American community samples in the main text, although some of our pilot studies with college students (see OSF for full details) showed comparable results. This suggests some generalizability of the findings; nonetheless, it is important to expand this work to other groups. For example, there are many other cultural groups outside the East and West. Recent work shows Arab and Latin American individuals are self-enhancing, similar to European Americans, despite being interdependent like East Asians (Kitayama & Salvador, 2024; Kitayama et al., 2022; Salvador et al., 2024a; Salvador et al., 2024b; San Martin et al., 2018). It would be of theoretical interest to test whether these groups show an attenuated self-serving bias in moral judgments. Nonetheless, this work begins to expand the scope of the literature by showing the key role of culture and self-enhancement in understanding moral judgments.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-jcc-10.1177_00220221241255673 – Supplemental material for Who Is Your Biggest Critic?: Cultural Variation in Moral Judgments of the Self and Others

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jcc-10.1177_00220221241255673 for Who Is Your Biggest Critic?: Cultural Variation in Moral Judgments of the Self and Others by Cristina E. Salvador, Cindel J. M. White and Ting Ai in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cristina E. Salvador

Supplemental Material

Supplemental information for this article is available online.

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