Individualism, Collectivism, and how cultural backgrounds shape personality and belief
Culture, in the words of E.B Tylor, “ That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by woman/man as a member of society.” In the realm of sociology, society acts as bread and butter and sets almost the entire basis of the subject. One way to think about cultures would be “a set of values or ideals that ‘have worked’ in the experience of a society that was worth transmitting to the future generations.”
Collectivists and individualists possess fundamental differences in the way they interact and thus creating different societal values, and cultural values.
In the primary stage of socialization, children start learning how to interact by language, and mimicry. In collectivist cultures, child rearing emphasizes “conformity, obedience, security, and reliability”, whereas in an individualistic culture, child rearing emphasizes “independence, exploration, creativity, and self-reliance”. A good example of a contrast between how an individualistic culture and a collectivistic culture would treat the child during the primary socialization stage could be done with something as simple as a toy. A mother in a collectivistic cultural background, such as China, would tell her child to share the toy with his/her sibling. Whereas a mom in an individualistic culture might tell her child to take turns to play with the toy with his/her sibling.
As personality is primarily shaped during adolescent years, where media usually takes over the teenagers’ world, television advertising becomes what unconsciously influences a teen. In a journal article published by the International Communication Gazette, a cross-cultural study was done between US and China on how cultural values were promoted in television advertisements targeting young adults by integrating collectivistic and individualistic values. Their research method was primarily based upon content analysis of a total of 566 television ads originating from both china and US. In their content analysis, they primarily focused on developing a coding schema for the advertisement, in order to score each advertisement base on how much individualistic or collectivistic characteristics the advertisement possess of. “Taking care of family, harmony of others” were traits of collectivism, whereas “Hedonism, leadership, personal success” were characteristics of individualism. The result of their study proposed a very interesting postulation, that China is slowly undergoing a cultural shift into a more individualistic country. This is mainly due to the change in economy, society, and technology. Part of this may be due to globalization, however, (berry, 2008) “believes that young adults in China are not replacing their cultural values but simply combining the individualistic values and collectivistic values that seem most appealing to them, also known as ‘bi-cultural’ appeal.” This shows how culture is not the only factor in sociology that determines how collectivism and individualism affect personality, and that society, economic status, and social stratification all play a part as well.
People in collectivistic cultures, are more likely to define themselves in aspects of groups, and usually place the group’s priorities in front of their own. In conflict situations, collectivists are mainly concerned about their relationship status with their in-group members. Thus, they prefer resolutions or any sort of ‘mediation’ that do not destroy relationships. On the contrary, individualists are willing to utilize the legal forces in order to settle disputes. According to the “ Individualism-Collectivism and Personality” journal article published by Harry Triandis, the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. In individualist societies, people are ‘autonomous and independent from their in-group”, and they give “priority to their personal goals over the goals of their in-groups.”
According to the research done by Harry Triandis, he believes that ecology shapes culture, which includes child-rearing patterns, which influence personality. Ecology includes “features of the geography, resources, and the history of a society. “
In other words, societies that have experiences in failure in history and those who did not will adjust correspondingly, creating different ways to fill in the gap the failure might have caused them. For example, society that are more isolated, such as a small island, tend to include members who are highly interdependent, as they have a very clear set of cultural norms, and deviant behaviour will not be tolerated well. These societies tend to rank high on collectivism.(Carpenter, 2000; Triandis, 1994, 1995). However, in slightly ‘looser’ cultures, they are usually more tolerable of deviation from social norms. Such culture is usually found in societies where several “normative systems coexist”, dependence on each other within the society, and the population density tend to be low.
Culture differs in complexity, and the more complex the culture, the more individualistic it is likely to be. (Triandis, 1994, 1995). One way to measure how complex a particular culture is will be to see how the society is doing economically, technologically, and population-wise. Gross national product per capita, percent of population, size of cities, personal computer per capita, and so forth. Evidently, there are more lifestyles and choices one has to make in a complex culture. Thus, it is expected that people who are in individualist cultures want to have more options and are motivated when they have something to work for, where people in collectivist cultures lack.
Alterations in society results in modifications in cultures which in turn, changes someone’s personality. The attributes of individualism put a greater emphasis on consistency, and self-enhancement. They tend to see the ‘self’ as ‘stable’ and the social environment as changeable. So they are inclined to altering the social environment to fit their personalities. On the other hand, collectivistic people see themselves as a collective ‘whole’ with their group, so their personality is more ‘flexible’, and their personality traits are mixed. All these journal articles studied the two different social theories in the eyes of a sociologist. Since personality has both a genetic and an environmental basis, there may be more to find out when we try to link genes with both cultural characteristics.
Reference Page (ASA Format)
Triandis, Harry C. “Individualism and collectivism: cross-cultural perspectives on self-ingroup relationships.” Journal of personality and social psychology ():908-924. Retrieved from on Apr 9, 2015
Rhee, Eun . 1996 “Variations in collectivism and individualism by ingroup and culture: confirmatory factor analysis..” American sociological association 71(5):1037-1054. Retrieved from on Apr 9, 2015
Hsu, Siu Yu. 2013 “Individualism and collectivism in chinese and american television advertising.” International communication gazette 75(8):695-714. Retrieved from on Apr 9, 2015
Triandis, Harry C. 1990 “Multimethod probes of individualism and collectivism.” Journal of personality and social psychology 59(5):1006-1020. Retrieved from on Apr 9, 2015
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