Zhang, Congcong2024-04-052023-08Zhang_cornellgrad_0058F_13837http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:13837https://hdl.handle.net/1813/114819190 pagesAchievement attribution, which refers to the pattern of how people attribute their achievement outcome to specific causes, has been extensively studied in recent years. However, the cultural differences in making attribution and the underlying mechanisms of explaining attributional judgments in cross-cultural contexts still remain unclear. This dissertation explores multiple theoretical approaches to enhance our understanding of the complexities of attribution patterns observed within and across cultures. The first study (i.e., the meta-analysis in Chapter 2) adopted a meta-analytic approach to assessing the results of previous self-enhancement studies and explored potential moderators to explain variations found in existing results. The findings suggested that methodological factors, including the valence of events, explicit (vs. implicit) measures, the role of respondents as an actor (vs. an observer), the benchmark for comparison and the types of comparison (direct vs. indirect), can affect conclusions in self-enhancement studies across cultures. The second study (i.e., the experimental study in Chapter 3) further explored the mechanisms of predicting self-enhancing attribution between the East and the West. In particular, the role of self-esteem and self-concept and the mediated pathways through modesty and face concern were examined. We found that: a) first, explicit self-esteem, dialectic self and interdependent self-construal exerted a great influence on achievement attribution; b) second, modesty and face concern were two competing forces in explaining the influence of interdependent self-construal on self-enhancing attribution; c) third, the salience of the proposed mechanisms varied across cultures. And interestingly, the proposed mechanisms predicted the self-enhancing attribution in success conditions only (in comparison to failure conditions). In Chapter 4, I analyzed the multinational data from two experimental studies about achievement attribution to test the competing hypotheses informed by three theoretical approaches (i.e., universal self-enhancement approach, relative self-enhancement approach and cultural cognition approach). Results indicated that both self-enhancing motivations and cognitive processes, along with measurement instruments can affect what we can observe. Implications and future directions for studying attributional judgments in cross-cultural contexts were discussed in Chapter 5.enAttributional JudgmentsIntercultural CommunicationSelf-enhancementdissertation or thesishttps://doi.org/10.7298/1gwv-9p98