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Individualism

Individualism, as defined by Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama and Harry C. Triandis, is a cultural pattern in which individuals feel autonomous from ingroups, such as family, work group, political party, religious groups, educational group, geographic group, economic group, race, sex, nationality, and so on. When personal goals are different from in-group goals, the individual is most likely to choose the personal goals. Triandis found that in such cultures social behavior is a function of attitudes much more than of in-group norms, and people stay in relationships only if the costs of the relationships are smaller than the rewards.

When data are obtained across cultures, individualism is the one pole of a dimension and collectivism is the other pole. When data are obtained within culture these two tendencies are often orthogonal to each other, and for that reason it is best to use a different terminology for work within culture. Corresponding to individualism is idiocentrism; corresponding to collectivism is allocentrism.

All cultures have idiocentrics and allocentrics, but more idiocentrics are found in individualist cultures and more allocentrics in collectivist cultures. When culture and personality are consistent, the individual is well adjusted. When they are inconsistent, the individual is dissatisfied or even maladjusted. Thus, idiocentrics in collectivist cultures try to leave the culture and move to an individualist culture; allocentrics in an individualist culture try to join a variety of groups, but feel that they never have sufficiently intimate relationships with others.

Conceptual Overview

People in individualist cultures often feel proud or superior, are high in well-being, and easily move in and out of new groups. Thus they have less difficulty leaving a company than those in collectivist cultures. They emphasize the new and uncommon. They are curious and exploratory. They like to confront and debate. They make the fundamental attribution error (see the behavior of others as due to internal factors like attitudes and beliefs; while the others see it as due to external factors like norms and role definitions) more often than do collectivists. They socialize their children by emphasizing creativity, exploration, and adventure.

Idiocentrics

When asked who they are, idiocentrics give mostly personality attributes, and allocentrics give mostly social attributes, such as “I am a member of this work group” or “I am an uncle.” In work relationships, idiocentrics show social loafing (the tendency to let others do the work) while in collectivist cultures workers working with in-group members do not show this tendency, though they do show it if they are working with out-group members.

Idiocentrics value personal effectiveness, achievement, and hedonism more than personal relationships. They tend to be direct, candid, and generally themselves, not paying too much attention to the feelings of others. When they break a norm, they tend to justify their actions rather than to apologize.

Idiocentrics see the world from the inside out. Thus, they see most entities according to their personal standards rather than according to the standards of other people. As a result they use their personal standards in judging their accomplishments rather than the standards of other people, such as their parents. They conceive success to be a function of their personal attributes rather than the help they have received from others. Their most frequent emotions are disengaged from others (e.g., superior, proud). They value privacy, and use abstract language more often than allocentrics. For example, they are likely to say “he is stubborn” rather than “on Monday when I tried to persuade him, he did not change his views.” Idiocentrics pay less attention to the context of stimuli or social behaviors and emphasize the context of communications (e.g., how was something said, gestures, tone of voice, position of the body) less than do allocentrics. In short, they focus on the content of the message. They are less concerned with saving the other person's face. They reject inconsistency, while among allocentrics the meaning of an entity depends on its context so that inconsistent entities are acceptable. Among idiocentrics, in-groups and out-groups are seen as not very different, but the person is seen as very different from in-groups. According to Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, professionalism, for idiocentrics, means one is not supposed to engage in many social behaviors or discuss personal matters in work settings.

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