Mediating effects of relational mobility on cultural differences in pride and embarrassment in success

Abstract

Previous research has found that, in successful situations, East Asians tend to feel less pride and greater embarrassment than Westerners. From a socio-ecological perspective, we propose that these cultural differences in self-conscious emotions after success could be due to cross-societal differences in the expected reward or punishment that others would assign to the actor for high achievement, which in turn stems from different levels of relational mobility. Supporting our theory, a vignette study with American and Japanese participants showed that (a) Japanese felt more embarrassment and less pride in successful situations than Americans; (b) the cultural differences in embarrassment were mediated by relational mobility and the expected punishment for high achievers; (c) the indirect effect of relational mobility and the expected reward for high achievers on pride was in the predicted direction but was not significant.