Moral face and social face: Contingent self-esteem in Confucian society

Three empirical studies related to the Chinese concept of face are reviewed to provide examples of the indigenous approach of Chinese psychology. Using the technique of paired comparison, the first study indicated that college students (who are preparing to enter the job market) feel that they “have face” most when they do well in their academic performance, followed by being morally upright. Retirees (who have withdrawn from the workplace) feel that they “have face” most when their children are morally upright and successful in their careers. The second study (on patterns of emotional reactions of related others to an agent's social and moral incidents) showed, first, that incidents of positive achievement were generally evaluated by college students as being experienced with a more intense feeling of having face than were incidents of positive morality, while incidents of negative morality were experienced with a more intense feeling of “having no face” than were incidents of negative achievement. Second, for a positive incident of having face, the intensity of emotional reaction experienced by acquaintances was generally lower than that of family members. The difference was not so strong as in the negative incident of having no face. The third study (which was a cross‐cultural one on cognitive distortion caused by misconduct of related others) indicated that American college students tended to adopt a consistent standard to judge the wrongness of illegal behaviours, regardless of their relationships with the transgressor. But Taiwanese college students tended to judge an illegal behaviour as more wrong when it was done by a person outside the family, while they held a more lenient attitude towards the misconduct of parents, and a similar or more harsh attitude towards their children. Research findings are interpreted in the context of Confucian tradition. Trois études empiriques reliées au concept chinois de face (défini comme le statut atteint par un individu à travers la reconnaissance sociale de sa performance et de son sens moral) sont examinées afin d'illustrer l'approche indigène de la psychologie chinoise. La première étude a utilisé la technique de la comparaison pairée. Elle a montré que les étudiants collégiens (qui se préparent à entrer sur le marché du travail) sentent surtout qu'ils ont la face quand ils réussissent bien sur le plan académique, suivi par le fait d'être moralement honnête. Les retraités (ceux qui ont quitté leur travail) sen