There's long been a maddening belief by a subset of psychologists who have never actually been to the Eastern part of the world that Asia is some collectivist Utopia.

When it comes to inflated self-importance - hubris, even - some research contends, there is more of it in the west because Western culture prides itself on independence, personal success and uniqueness while in the East where harmony and belonging are supposedly valued, people are more modest.

One trip to Japan would change their minds; I love Japan but Japanese people are the most xenophobic people on the planet.  They are outwardly modest but mentally they think they are better than you are - and they may be right.  Plus, they sell used girls' underwear in vending machines and I don't think that is really all that culturally superior to anyone.

A new study in Psychological Science takes a different stance and says economic 'inequality' is a better indicator of inflated self-importance than culture.   Socialists will rejoice.

The study naturally used - wait for it, wait for it - yes, college students, who were asked to rate themselves on a 1 to 7 scale for various personality traits versus 'the average student' and how desirable the trait was. There were four versions of the survey that had various traits chosen from 80 total, but they were all related to things like conscientiousness, open-mindedness and emotionality. 

They 'adjusted' for differing cultural values and you already see the flaw in that; it's okay to stop reading now if you are scratching your head wondering how people at 16 universities around the world agreed on adjusting for their cultural values, especially if the western ones were boosting the awesomeness of those in the east.

Result; all college students rank themselves above average.  No surprise there, those funny surveys show 90% of Harvard freshmen believe they will be in the top 50% of their class.  Their correlation, though, stands out.  The more the economic inequality - based on their metric, of course - the greater the self-importance, they concluded.  There may be some truth to that, using college students anyway.   The 100,000 Baathists in Iraq during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein had runaway economic inequality but felt like they deserved it.  They were better than the other Iraqis in their minds.

But what about China, supposedly more economically equal because it is Communist?   Surveys of college students aside, the real world tells a different story.   The Chinese people were charmed and amazed that Gary Locke, the new American ambassador to China, stood in line at Starbucks to get a coffee and carried his own backpack.   That was unheard of, despite it being in the East and a country where economic equality is supposedly the rule but in reality, even a lowly local government official goes everywhere in a chauffeur-driven car.

"This is something unbelievable in China," said ZhaoHui Tang, who snapped the picture of Locke getting his own coffee that so impressed the Chinese. "Even for low-ranking officials, we don't do things for ourselves. Someone goes to buy the coffee for them. Someone carries their bags for them."

So do the psychologists draw a conclusion from their economic inequality/self-aggrandizing culture data?  No, it is what it is; a group of college students taking a survey which was calibrated by poorly controlled cultural weighting that wants to make an implied conclusion about how terrible capitalism is.  

University of Kent research associate Steve Loughnan said,  "We're living through a time of considerable economic reform in Western countries. The nature of that reform will have a big impact on people's personal and social wellbeing" and it "is not just about making the society richer, but how you distribute those riches."

So if we all go to Harvard. we'll be more modest people.  This is true.  When you artificially make everyone exceptional, no one is.

Citation: Loughnan, S., Kuppens, P., Allik, J., Balazs, K., de Lemus, S., Dumont, K., Gargurevich, R., Hidegkuti, I., Leidner, B., Matos, L., Park., J., Realo, A., Shi, J., Sojo, V., Tong, Y-Y., Vaes, J., Verduyn, P., Yeung, V.,&Haslam., N, 'Economic inequality is linked to biased self-perception', Psychological Science (in press)