Individualism And Collectivism

Harry C Triandis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813318493
• eBook ISBN: 9780429979477
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the constructs of collectivism and individualism and the wide-ranging implications of individualism and collectivism for political, social, religious, and economic life, drawing on examples from Japan, Sweden, China, Greece, Russia, the United States, and other countries.

1

Introduction:
Two Constructs

WHAT DO THE FOLLOWING incidents have in common?

1. In Brazil, a waiter brings one menu for four people and gives it to the “senior” member of the group, who orders the same food for all.

2. In France, each member of the group orders a different entree at a restaurant.

3. In India, a senior engineer is asked to move to New York, at a salary that is twenty-five times his salary in New Delhi, but he declines the opportunity.

4. In California, a senior engineer is asked to move to New York, at a salary that is 50 percent higher than his salary in Los Angeles, and he accepts.

5. On a street in Moscow, an older woman scolds a mother she does not know because she thinks the mother has not wrapped her child warmly enough.

6. In New York, a woman asks for help from passersby to escape from the beatings that her boyfriend is giving her, but no one helps.

7. In Japan, a supervisor knows a great deal about the personal life of each subordinate and arranges for one of his subordinates to meet a nice girl he can marry.

8. In England, a subordinate does not mention to his supervisor that his father has just died.

9. In Germany, a man walks on the grass in a public park and is reprimanded by several passersby.

10. In Illinois, a man marries a woman his parents disapprove of.

As we analyze episodes of this kind, we find that they can be explained by two constructs: collectivism and individualism. The odd-numbered episodes reflect an aspect of collectivism; the even-numbered ones an aspect of individualism. The fact that ten so diverse social behaviors can be explained by just two constructs indicates that the constructs are useful and powerful.

However, their wide applicability also represents a danger. Like the man with a hammer who uses it at every opportunity, if we do not sharpen their meaning, we can overuse the constructs.

The terms individualism and collectivism are used by many people in different parts of the world and are given various meanings. And because the terms are rather fuzzy, they are difficult to measure. Galileo Galilei said, “Science is measurement,” meaning that if we are going to understand, classify, and predict events, we need to measure them. In recent years social psychologists have made numerous attempts to measure tendencies toward individualism and collectivism, and in doing so they discovered considerable complexity in what should be included in these constructs. They have also theorized about the causes and consequences of people’s behaving in individualistic and collectivist ways and discovered that people are typically both individualists and collectivists. The optimal states of individual and societal health are linked to the balance between these tendencies. Many problems of modernity can be linked to too much individualism, whereas a lack of human rights can be attributed to too much collectivism. This book describes some of the studies that have led to these conclusions.

Collectivism may be initially defined as a social pattern consisting of closely linked individuals who see themselves as parts of one or more collectives (family, co-workers, tribe, nation); are primarily motivated by the norms of, and duties imposed by, those collectives; are willing to give priority to the goals of these collectives over their own personal goals; and emphasize their connectedness to members of these collectives. A preliminary definition of individualism is a social pattern that consists of loosely linked individuals who view themselves as independent of collectives; are primarily motivated by their own preferences, needs, rights, and the contracts they have established with others; give priority to their personal goals over the goals of others; and emphasize rational analyses of the advantages and disadvantages to associating with others.

The reader will want some explanation of why the ten behaviors mentioned above reflect these constructs. Brazil, India, Russia, and Japan are collectivist countries, though in different degrees. France, the United States, England, and Germany are individualistic countries, also in different degrees. Nevertheless, one can find both collectivist and individualistic elements in all these countries, in different combinations.

In Brazil, the waiter assumes that the senior member of the group will decide what to eat and that ultimately consuming the same food will intensify bonds among the members of the group, whereas in France, the waiter infers that each person has personal preferences that must be respected.

In India, the senior engineer feels he must stay close to his parents and that New York is simply too far. If his father were dying, it would be the engineers duty to be at his bedside and facilitate his passage to the other state. Under similar conditions in the United States, it is more likely that the parent would be placed in a nursing home. The parent and his son have their own lives and are independent entities.

In Russia it is assumed that the whole community is responsible for child rearing. If the parent is not doing an adequate job, an older person is responsible for upholding community standards. “Putting one’s nose in another person’s business” is perfectly natural and expected.

Ones supervisor in Japan is often like a father, one who is obliged to attend to the needs of his subordinates. Locating a suitable mate for a subordinate may be one of his duties. In England, where individualism is quite intense, the death of a parent may be private information not to be shared with a supervisor. U. Kim (1994b) did a national survey in Korea and asked a representative sample of firms whether they carry out specific acts in relation to their personnel. He found that 47 percent of Korean firms send condolences to employees whose grandparents died. No less than 79 percent congratulate employees when their children marry. Even school admission of an employees child is cause for congratulation (15 percent of the firms); 31 percent congratulate employees for the birthday of one of their parents-in-law. No less than 40 percent send condolences for the death of a parent-in-law. Of course, all the firms congratulate employees on the birth of a child and the like. Services provided to employees include opportunities to go to picnics (89 percent) and to a library (44 percent).

Germany, though overall quite individualistic, is also collectivist in certain respects. The German episode is illustrative of collectivist behavior. Walking on hard-to-grow grassy areas is a community concern, and witnesses to such “deviant” behavior may take action. In most cultures, people try to marry a spouse that their parents find acceptable. However, in very individualistic cultures like the United States, it is assumed that people are independent entities and can marry someone regardless of parental disapproval. In individualist cultures marriage is an institution that only links two people and not their respective families. In collectivist cultures it links two families, in which case it is mandatory that the families find the mate acceptable.

Countries Versus Cultures

In the foregoing examples, I used the country as the equivalent of the culture. This equivalence is very approximate. Some estimates of the number of cultures that exist begin with 10,000. The UN had 186 countries at the time of this writing; thus it is obvious that each country includes many cultures. Most countries consist of hundreds of cultures and corresponding subcultures. For example, most occupational groups, corporations, or ethnic groups have fairly distinct cultures. A culture is usually linked to a language, a particular time period, and a place. English is widely used in different parts of the world, for example, India and Singapore, but that does not mean that all people who speak English possess the same culture. They may have more in common, of course, with other English speakers than with people who speak Chinese, but language on its own is insufficient to create a common culture. Historical period and geographic location are also needed to define a culture. The culture of British Columbia, Canada, is not identical to the culture of New South Wales, Australia. The culture of Illinois, 1950, is not the same as the culture of Illinois, 1990. Culture emerges in interaction. As people interact, some of their ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving are transmitted to each other and become automatic ways of reacting to specific situations. The shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles, and behaviors are aspects of culture.

Culture in the Examples

Culture is to society what memory is to individuals. It includes the things that have “worked” in the past. For example, one who invents a tool might tell his or her children about this tool. Others may pick up the idea and use it too. Soon, people come and go and the tool remains. The society uses the tool like a memory of what has worked in the past. Tools are parts of culture, just as are words, shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles, and values, which are called elements of “subjective culture” (Triandis, 1972).

One of culture’s most important aspects is “unstated assumptions.” The assumption that we are bound together into tight groups of interdependent individuals is fundamental to collectivism. The assumption that we are independent entities, different and distant from our groups, is fundamental to individualism. If we look at the ten examples, we see that such assumptions hold. The Brazilian waiter saw a group of interconnected individuals, with a “senior” member who would order the food. The French waiter saw individual preferences as unrelated to group influences. The Indian engineer saw himself linked to his parents; the American engineer saw his parents as having a life of their own. The elderly Russian woman saw herself linked to the mother passing by; the New Yorkers saw no ties to the woman asking for help. The Japanese supervisor saw himself linked to his subordinates and thus felt that it was his duty to take care of their personal problems. The English subordinate saw himself not linked at all to his supervisor, so the supervisor had no inherent right to obtain private information. The German citizens saw themselves linked to the community and felt a need to defend it from a person who broke the rules. The Illinois man saw himself as a discrete entity, only weakly linked to his parents.

Such basic unstated assumptions are so fundamental that we are unaware of them. It is not until we come into contact with people from another cultures that we realize that our assumptions are not universal. An interesting example is the case of a Japanese biologist by the name of Imanishi, discussed in detail by Dale (1986). Imanishi argued that it is not individuals who struggle for survival, as Darwin stated, but species. Darwin, as a Westerner, used the individual as the “obvious” unit of analysis. Imanishi, as a collectivist, used the species. Such a distinction is an interesting example of how our basic assumptions play themselves out in our purview of the world.

Individual Differences

We know that there are people in each of the countries that were mentioned in the examples who would have acted very differently. In every culture there are people who are allocentric, who believe, feel, and act very much like collectivists do around the world. There are also people who are idiocentric, who believe, feel, and act the way individualists do around the world. For example, we know Americans who would not hesitate to marry someone their parents dislike, but we also know Americans who would never do such a thing. In China those who press for human rights are likely to be idiocentric in a collectivist culture. In the United States, those who join communes are likely to be allocentric in an individualistic culture. Thus, in every culture we get the full distribution of both types.

If I claim that Americans eat red meat, that would be statistically correct because more than 85 percent of them do. Americans, in fact, eat more red meat than people in most other countries do. But there are vegetarians in the United States, and there are people who watch their cholesterol and eat only fish. Any generalization, therefore, is a statistical tendency.

Furthermore, what may be called “the situation” is very important. People who have been raised in collectivist cultures tend to “cognitively convert” situations into collectivist settings; people who have been raised in individualistic cultures tend to convert situations into individualistic settings. The Englishman who did not mention to his supervisor that his father had died may be more idiocentric than most Britons and also may have perceived the supervisor-subordinate situation as more distant, less interdependent, than is true of the perceptions of most Britons. In contrast, the trend in collectivist cultures is to perceive closeness between members of the group. Thus, for instance, after a meeting with a stranger, and after establishing what might become an ingroup relationship, the collectivist may ask, “How much money do you make per month?” The corresponding trend in individualistic cultures is to be idiocentric and convert most situations into social relationships of separateness. Thus, for instance, when individualists hear someone’s calls for help, they may say to themselves, “That’s not my problem.”

Social Patterns

There are several factors to consider in ascertaining how a social pattern like collectivism or individualism operates. First, as mentioned earlier, language, historical period, and geographic region reflect specific “subjective cultures.” Subjective culture may be defined as shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles, and values found among speakers of a particular language who live during the same historical period in a specified geographic region. These shared elements of subjective culture are usually transferred from generation to generation. Since communication requires language and occurs most readily among people who live in the same historic period and sufficiently close to each other to communicate easily, language, time, and place help define culture. Culture is superorganic (does not depend on the presence of particular individuals), and at some point in its history, it probably adopted the specific elements of subjective culture. Major changes in climate and ecology (e.g., methods of making a living, subsistence patterns), historical events (e.g., wars, conquests by another cultural group), and cultural diffusion (from migration or exposure to the products of other cultures) may drastically affect culture. For example, Weiss et al. (1993) showed how the Akkadians, a major civilization of the 3000 to 2200 b.c. period, collapsed as a society because of a significant climatic change. When the region to their north became exceedingly arid, there was mass migration to the Akkadians’ area, which they were unable to stop in spite of building walls, and eventually they were overcome.

Frequently the elements of subjective culture become organized around a central theme. We then have a “cultural syndrome.” With respect to individualism, the theme includes the idea that individuals are the units of analysis and are autonomous; in the case of collectivism, the theme incorporates the notion that groups are the units of analysis and individuals are tightly intertwined parts of these groups.

Gould and Kolb (1964) defined individualism as a belief that the individual is an end in herself and ought to realize the self and cultivate judgment, notwithstanding the weight of pervasive social pressure in the direction of conformity. Triandis (1990) relied on this definition to propose that collectivism includes (1) emphasis on the views, needs, and goals of the ingroup rather than on the self; (2) emphasis on behavior determined by social norms and duties rather than by pleasure or personal advantage; (3) common beliefs that are shared with the ingroup; and (4) willingness to cooperate with ingroup members.

In their important review of how the independent and interdependent self influences cognition, emotion, and motivation, Markus and Kitayama (1991b) used the terms independent construal of the self individualism, egocentric, separate, au...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• New Directions in Social Psychology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Two Constructs
• 2 Individualism and Collectivism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences
• 3 Attributes of Individualism and Collectivism
• 4 Antecedents and Geographic Distribution of Individualism and Collectivism
• 5 Consequences of Individualism and Collectivism
• 6 Applications: Training People to Work Well Together
• 7 Evaluation of Individualism and Collectivism
• Appendix: Measurement of Individualism and Collectivism
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index