Cross-Cultural Variability in Self-Continuity Warranting Strategies

Previous research has shown that (a) when individuals are pressed to justify their persistence through time (i.e., their self-continuity), they do so by constructing autobiographical life stories or by recognizing temporally stable personal attributes and (b) the prevalence in the endorsement of these strategies varies across cultural groups. Here we prompted for both life stories and temporally stable personal attributes among immigrant Asian Canadians and nonimmigrant Euro-Canadians. Life stories were coded for autobiographical reasoning processes and the frequency of stable personal attributes was noted. Immigrant Asian Canadians exhibited a heightened complexity of autobiographical reasoning, whereas nonimmigrant Euro-Canadians proffered more temporally stable attributes. These results inform understanding regarding self-continuity warranting strategies; the ways in which individuals use language to justify their sense of self through time vary culturally.