Modesty Bias and the Attitude-Achievement Paradox Across Nations: A Reanalysis of TIMSS

Academic self-concept (ASC) and achievement are generally seen as mutually reinforcing and hence positively correlated. However, international comparisons have found negative associations between academic self-concept and achievement when country averages are compared. One possible explanation for this paradox is the 'modesty bias', which refers to cultural preferences of people from different cultural backgrounds when responding to scales pertaining to their own abilities. In the present article, we analyzed three TIMSS data sets from 2003 to 2011 to test the importance of modesty bias by introducing average self-concept on the country level to a hierarchical linear model (HLM) with student ASC as the dependent variable. Modesty bias substantially reduced the negative country level effect, accounting for about a third of the effect size. On an exploratory basis, Enjoyment of Math on the country-level was added to the model, which further reduced the negative associations between academic self-concept and achievement on the country level. High achieving countries are characterized by high salience of modesty norms but lower level of enjoyment of math. Findings support the idea that the paradox is mainly due to a combination of cultural response bias and cultural differences in students' liking of school.