Although there is growing evidence that dialectical thinkers express more inconsistency within the global self-concept, whether this holds true for inconsistency across roles and within specific roles has received little attention. I examine whether dialectical thinking is associated with less cross-role and within-role consistency and whether dialecticism moderates the relationship between self-consistency and subjective well-being, self-concept certainty, and felt authenticity. Participants completed measures of the above outcomes, a measure of dialectical thinking, and a self-description measure for both the global self-concept and within two roles (e.g., friend), from which I derived both cross-role and within-role consistency scores. Dialectical thinking predicted lower scores on both types of consistency, and in general dialecticism moderated the relationship between self-concept consistency and both subjective well-being and self-concept certainty. Dialecticism also moderated the relationship between cross-role consistency and authenticity, and the relationship between authenticity and subjective well-being. I conclude by discussing directions for future research.

One explanation for the lower self-esteem of East Asians is that they have dialectical, or inconsistent, self-esteem in that they endorse both the positively and the negatively keyed items of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, relative to Euro-Americans. The following research extended this effect to implicit self-esteem. In two studies, Chinese, Euro-Americans (Studies 1 and 2), and Chinese Americans (Study 2) completed explicit and implicit measures of self-esteem. On both types of measures, Chinese scored most highly on various indices of dialectical self-esteem. In Study 2, the explicit self-esteem of Chinese Americans was similar to that of Chinese, but their implicit self-esteem was identical to that of Euro-Americans. In the discussion, we focus on how East Asians come to possess inconsistent self-esteem and pose questions for future research.

Despite mounting evidence that members of Asian cultures are less likely to engage in behavior that makes them appear distinctive (i.e., individuating behavior) than members of prototypical Western culture, the direct mechanisms through which this effect occurs have not been explored. In the present research, we examined the role of judgments of social appropriateness for both acceptance of and comfort engaging in individuating behavior, and the role of the divergent self-construals thought to characterize these cultural groups (i.e., Asian and Euro-Americans). Results indicated that ethnicity moderated the relationship between judgments of social appropriateness and acceptance of individuating behavior, and self-construals mediated the relationship between ethnicity and both acceptance of and comfort engaging in individuating behavior. Limitations and implications are discussed.

We examined defensive responses to self-clarity threats, finding that self-uncertain participants gave larger rewards to a social hero, but larger punishments to a social transgressor, than self-certain participants (Study 1). To examine whether there are individual differences in defensiveness to meaning threats, we included moderators, showing that high self-esteem individuals (HSE) thinking about self-inconsistencies gave more polarized evaluations of someone criticizing vs. complimenting their ingroup than self-consistent HSEs (Study 2). We found similar responses to a relational self-clarity threat, among individuals for whom relationships are self-defining (Study 3). Results held controlling for the impact of the self-clarity manipulations on self-esteem. This research is compatible with the meaning maintenance model, which stipulates that various meaning threats elicit fluid compensatory efforts designed to restore general feelings of meaningfulness. We discuss limitations and future directions.