Abstract

To inverstigate the relationship between respondents' cultural dispositions and their focus of attention in some self-related areas, Korean high school students (n＝624: Study 1) and college students (n＝239: Study 2) participated and were divided into 2 groups: idiocentrics who have individualistic cultural disposition and allocentrics who have collectivist cultural disposition according to their scores on the Individualism-Collectivism Scale. We compared their responses on the 4 scales/questionaires: Self-Consciousness Scale, Depressive Experience Questionaire, False Uniqueness Perception Questionaire and False Consensus Perception Questionaire. As anticipated, the followings were found: Idiocintrics have strong private self-consciousness, are vulnerable to efficacy depression, and exaggerate their uniqueness in various abilities and individualistic traits; In contrast with idiocentrics, allocentrics have strong public self-consciousness, are vulnerable to dependency depression, and exaggerate their similarities with others in various tastes/hobbies and opinions/attitudes/values. On the bases of these results, it was discussed that idiocentric's attention is focused mostly to his/her own inner personal chatacteristics, while allocentric attends mostly to significant others and ingroup norms.