the terms individualism and collectivism suggest too many people political IDs and in fact the both words were used as far as I know for the first time in the 19th century for political ideologies anything that ends on ISM sounds like a political ideology and they had already from the beginning a very strong value content they were felt to be either good or evil in the 1920s somebody used them as the opposite ends of one scale and then in the 1960s the word individualism also emerged in personality psychology and people started to refer to individualist personalities
nobody ever tried to talk about collectivist personalities by the way but I chose the term individualism versus collectivism when I needed words to describe the differences between national societies differences that actually had been described before me by several different sociologists so I didn't invent a dimension at all it was it clearly describes in difference of the logical sex but I used these terms for it and now here's the definition individualism is a society in which the ties between individuals are loose everyone is expected to look after her himself and the immediate family father mother and
children at collectivism is a society in which individuals from birth onwards are part of strong in groups usually the family sometimes the extended family sometimes the village society sometimes a tribe if I oppose the individual lists and the collectivist and I find that in collectivist societies people identify with we they have a we identity and an individual Society obviously an i identity in the collectivist society they are with a difficult word exclusionists they classify others as in or out group and if they are out group they're excluded and in the individualist society they there is
universalism other people are classified as individuals by their own particular characteristics the competition in collectivist society is not between individuals but between groups between tribes you could say they're often tribal societies and in the individualist society the competition is between individuals when it comes to carrying out a task together in the collectivist society the relationship comes first the task comes second in the individualist society the task comes first and the relationship may come afterwards then there is a distinction which comes actually from the literature between high context communication and low context communication and in high
context communication it means that many that is for the collectivist society and that many things are obvious so actually the communication can be short individual societies everything must be specified and therefore the communications take more words they are more extensive and the last thing that I want to bring up is that a key word in collectivist society is a harmony there should be harmony inside the in-group even if people disagree there should maintain the superficial harmony because otherwise the in group will be weakens it will be we'll fall apart in the individualist society the idea
that confrontations can do no harm they can sometimes be healthy now how do we measure the position of a country on the individualism collectivism dimension it can only be measured relative to other societies there is no absolute yardstick for it and it is expressed in individualism scores ID v IV values can be plotted on a scale from zero to a hundred and scores close to zero sense for the most collectivist society and squirrel's close to 100 for the most individualist society and here is a selection of 14 countries out of the 76 for which we
have scores and the highest score for individualism we find in the United States of America on the high side we found Australia Britain also the Netherlands also Denmark France Germany in general we find European countries on the high individualism side we find a collectivist societies low RDV scores in places like India Japan also in Russia by the way and the Arab countries Mexico in the lowest in China what can we do with these scores well we can we can correlate them with hard data and I have a selection here of things that correlate significantly with
the RVT scores and first of all wealth or poverty of a country wealthier countries tend to be more individualist poorer countries to be more collectivist the order of logic in fact is not death individualism comes first it is that the wealth comes first and then the individualism follows collectivist societies have lower press freedom individualist societies have more press freedom then there are human rights they were established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and they are having measured by human rights index and the index is clearly lower for collectivist societies and for individualist societies it
must be said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created by people from individually societies in the family in the individualist societies you have higher divorce rates in the collectivist societies lower divorce rates often the marriages have been concluded also by the families and the ideal age for marrying is also different that's the interesting piece of research in the collectivist society the model relationship is over somewhat older husband and the younger wife in the individualist society is smaller age differences between the spouses another piece of research is about a pace of life and the
pace of life in collectivist societies is slower than the pace of life in the individualist societies which can for example be demonstrated by measuring how fast people walk in the street if they don't have any particular place to go just if they walk freely to go from A to B how fast they walk then in language that linguists have looked at it and not surprisingly the languages of individual societies use more the word I actually the most individuos language is English and this is the only language I know that writes I with a capital letter
there are other languages that writes you with a capital letter in the collectivist society sometimes there are languages where the word I is more or less taboo and where you are not supposed to use it and the last one is about recent applications in social media there is a difference visible individualist societies use social media for an active search and collectivist societies use it maybe for search by on indication of the end group or from communicating with the in-group now I want to say something about a relationship between individualism and power distance because it is
clear that countries with lower power distance are more often individualist and countries with a higher power distance are more often collectivist not always but more often but this turns out to be mainly the effects of the wealth individualism is strongly correlated with wealth power distance low power distance is somewhat correlated with wealth and if we take that effect out if we compare rich countries with rich countries and poor countries with poor countries the correlation between power distance and individualism almost disappears so that is the reason that I treat them still although they are correlated or
treat them as two separate dimensions in the United States some people write about horizontal and vertical individualism now that is of course a combination of ITV and PDI now the last question is do I DV scores change over time individualism versus collectivism are transferred from generation to generation you could be getting in the family and there's research by professor Burgos egg from Groningen who collects all sorts of to generation thirty years apart on questions related to and collectivism and what it shows is that over the 30 years that individualism has been only increase but it
has not changed the order of the country so the countries have moved along together and because the scores I use are based on the relative position of the countries this course did not change so the scores can be assumed to be stable over time
