Does Vanity Describe Other Cultures? A Cross‐Cultural Examination of the Vanity Scale

Vanity is a psychological construct that describes a person's excessive concern with physical appearance or achievement. A scale, recently developed to measure this construct, has been psychometrically validated using data from U.S. respondents. The goal of this paper is to determine if this scale can be used cross-culturally. If the scale has cross-cultural applicability, it can be used as a counseling device to guide and alert individuals to certain tendencies. The scale also can be used to track foreign cultures as they adopt a consumerism ethos more aligned to Western consumer culture. Based on data from 475 young adults in China, India, New Zealand, and the U.S., the scale was found to have similar dimensionality and factor structure, internal consistency, discriminant validity, and metric invariance. Implications and future directions for research are discussed. As economies develop and prosper, social transformations seem to alter the mentality of consumers. For example, in the early 1950s, Riesman (1951) suggested that members of U.S. society were becoming less inner-directed and more other-directed in needing the approval of others. A widely used instrument was later developed that could measure the inner- and other-directed nature of individuals (Earban et al. 1970; Kassarjian 1965). At the end of the 1970s, Christopher Lasch (1978) warned that American society was increasingly tending toward narcissism, which appears to be a form of vanity. Lasch's warning became an impetus for the development of the scale to measure narcissism, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin and Terry 1988). Recently, more discussion has been given to the presence of vanity in American culture. For example, Newsweek reported that cosmetic surgery for vanity reasons is increasing dramatically not only for aging baby boomers but also for teenagers as well (Kalb 1999). Preoccupatio n with vanity, therefore, may signal a significant change among some consumers in society. Such traits as inner-directedness or vanity should be of interest to consumer affairs specialists because these traits can influence motives of consumers in the marketplace and affect personal levels of well-being. The goal of this research is to examine the applicability of a scale to measure vanity in other cultures. In fact, a more basic question presents itself: Does vanity exist in the same form or structure as it does in the U.S.? Presently a way of measuring vanity has been developed, but its extension to other countries is unknown. Knowing the extent to which vanity is emerging in other countries is important. Such knowledge permits a better understanding of the evolving dynamics of other societies. Furthermore, the ability to measure vanity can serve as a counseling tool to guide or counsel individuals much like the use of personality tests or the consumer decision making style questionnaire that that has been examined cross culturally (Durvasula, Lysonski, and Andrews 1993; Fan and Xiao 1998). The outline of this paper is as follows. First, the background on the vanity concept and its connection to globalization is explored. Next, details are provided about the methodology, including sample selection and the multivariate techniques used. After the results are reported, implications, conclusions, and future research avenues are discussed. THE VANITY CONCEPT AND GLOBALIZATION Rampant globalization is spreading a materialistic ideology throughout the world particularly in developing economies. In its wake, even villagers and common people are being transformed into modern-day consumers. Some suggest that global consumer cultures are emerging with shared sets of consumption-related symbols that relate to product categories, brands, and consumption activities (Terpstra and David 1991). As consumers increasingly identify with consumer culture, their levels of vanity also are likely to change. One major force in the creation, learning, and sharing of these various consumption symbols is the mass media, coming predominantly from the U. …