Twenty Answers to “Who Am I?”

Self-portrait with an album and pen, 1819 — Self-portrait with an album and pen, Aleksandr Orlovsky, 1819. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0).

A sheet of paper has the words “I am” printed twenty times, with a blank after each. A first thought begins to fill the blank. It answers fast, in the person’s own voice, and it feels like the plainest answer there could be. KTT counts those answers as thoughts, noticed or not, even when they come as a single word. In 1989, the psychologist Steven Cousins gave the same task to Japanese and American college students, and then changed the question. The sources read for this article are the abstract of his study and later discussions of it.

The sheet with no context

The task is called the Twenty Statements Test. Cousins first used it as written, with no context. Consistent with earlier research, Japanese students listed fewer abstract, psychological attributes than American students did. They referred more to social roles and to what they did and where. An American answer might be “I am curious.” A Japanese answer was more likely to name a role or a setting.

The sheet with a place on it

Then Cousins changed the question. A second form asked the students to describe themselves in particular situations, such as at home, with friends or at school. The result reversed. Japanese students now gave more abstract, psychological attributes than the Americans. The Americans tended to qualify what they said, adding to a trait something like “usually” or “when I am relaxed.” On the first form, the Japanese students also produced more very abstract, global statements about themselves than the Americans did.

What he concluded

Cousins read the result as showing different cultural ideas of what a person is. He did not read it as a difference in ability. A later discussion explains the reversal this way: for the Americans, “selfness” was most vivid without context. For the Japanese, it was easier to describe oneself once a context was set.

What is not known

How the answers would have come out for the same people a year later, or on another day, is not known. The study measured one sitting.

Whether the pattern holds for students today, or for people who are not students, is also open. Later tests of the same theory give mixed results.

Whether the first thought that arrives is the person’s own, or the one the question invited, is not known from this study. It shows that the question changes the answer.