Ideal selves and self‐esteem in people with independent or interdependent self‐construal

Abstract Not living up to one's ideal self has been shown to coincide with decreased self‐esteem. In the present paper, this notion is applied to the differentiation between people with independent versus interdependent self‐construal. We suggest that the ideal self of independents differs in two respects from the one of interdependents: with respect to its contents (autonomous versus social self‐knowledge) and with respect to the degree of context‐dependency of the encoded knowledge (context‐independent versus context‐dependent self‐knowledge). In three studies, via a priming we either manipulated contents or degree of context‐dependency of what participants considered themselves to actually be like. On both explicit and implicit measures, participants with independent construal indicated higher self‐esteem after priming of autonomous and context‐independent knowledge than after priming of social and context‐dependent knowledge. The opposite pattern was observed in participants with interdependent construal. Results suggest that independent and interdependent construals mirror different ideals which are applied as a comparison standard when evaluating the self. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.