The Self-Esteem Importance Scale Shows Psychometric Invariance but Cultural Differences

Scholars studying cultural variation have suggested that self-esteem may not be equally prized across all populations. Researchers have suggested that western cultures tend to produce an emphasis on personal success and self-enhancement, whereas eastern cultures may deprioritize these values in favor of group achievements (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999). Previous work has blended having self-esteem with the pursuit of self-esteem (Heine & Hamamura, 2007), which we show are empirically and functionally distinct. We develop a scale of self-esteem importance (SEIS) to represent the pursuit of self-esteem, by assessing beliefs that high self-esteem has causal effects in life domains.

We show a strong latent structure (Study 1) for the SEIS. We next demonstrate that SEIS uniquely predicts self-handicapping (Study 2) in preparation for a difficult cognitive test, and sensitivity to social acceptance versus rejection vignettes (Study 3), whereas self-esteem does neither, suggesting a functional distinction between measures of having versus pursuing self-esteem. Finally, we recruit a large sample of students of Caucasians and east Asians to demonstrate the measurement invariance of the SEIS (Study 4). After demonstrating evidence of invariance (RMSEA and CFI deltas <= .01), we find a moderate mean-level difference between the groups (d = .41) suggesting greater beliefs about self-esteem’s consequentiality among Caucasian than east Asian students. This difference was larger than the students’ difference in trait self-esteem levels (d = .21). We suggest that a literature on cultural variation in having self-esteem can be supplemented with a parallel study of variation in the pursuit of self-esteem.