Mates Make Groups for Individualists But Not for Collectivists

Humans are an incredibly groupy type of animal. We form psychologically-meaningful groups based on our gender, age, nationality, religion, politics, skin colour, occupation, sexual inclination, and sports teams, to name just a few. Even in the artificial environment of psychology labs, people will identify with groups based on their totally random allocation to “Group A.” Indeed, they will declare that they feel “more similar” to Group A members than to Group B members, and even discriminate in favour of Group A members and against Group B members! But does everyone around the world identify with groups in the same way?

To investigate this issue, my colleagues and I conducted two studies in which we compared individualists (people from Western countries such as Australia and the USA) with collectivists (people from non-Western countries such as China and India). We measured people’s interpersonal closeness with other group members (in-group ties) and the degree to which they felt similar to other group members (perceived self-to-group similarity; a key indicator of social identification). In both studies, we found that interpersonal closeness was a significant positive predictor of perceived self-to-group similarity. In other words, the closer people felt to other people in their groups, the more similar they felt to them. Critically, however, this positive relation only held for individualists. There was no significant relationship between perceived interpersonal closeness and self-to-group similarity among the collectivists in our samples.

This suggests that interpersonal closeness is a stronger predictor of social identification among people from individualist cultures than among people from collectivist cultures. This is an important finding because social identification predicts prejudice and stereotyping, and so a better understanding of cross-cultural differences in the basis for social identification may help to improve the effectiveness of social interventions that reduce prejudice and stereotyping. For example, interventions based on interpersonal closeness may be more effective among people from individualist Western countries like the USA than among people from collectivist non-Western countries like China.

Our research helps to explain the basis for social identification among individualists. But it does leave an important question unanswered: On what basis do collectivists form their social identities? If interpersonal ties with other group members are not crucial, then what is? We believe that group harmony and sense of duty may represent two potential answers to this question.

For further information about this research, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., Milanov, M., & Paolini, S. (2016). Uncovering the diverse cultural bases of social identity: Ingroup ties predict self-stereotyping among individualists but not among collectivists Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 19 (3), 225-234 DOI: 10.1111/ajsp.12137   Self-Archived Version

For a You Tube video explaining the research, please click here.

How You Feel About People is Related to How You Feel About Cities

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. (Calvino, 1978, p. 44).

There are numerous structural factors that influence people’s attitudes towards cities, including the city’s architecture, size, infrastructure, transport, crime rates, population density, and quality of housing, to name just a few.  However, as the Italian writer Calvino (1978) alluded to in his book Invisible Cities, these factors may be constituents of broader sociocultural “questions” that people ask about their cities.  For example, residents’ concern about the transport and entertainment venues of a city might form part of a broader social psychological concern about the potential for the city to accommodate their need to meet friends and socialize with others. Alternatively, people might focus on a city’s economy and job opportunities because they are concerned about the ability of the city to meet their needs for personal income and wealth.

Hong Kong - Why Would You Want to Live There?

In some recently published research, Dr Tessa Morrison and I predicted that individual differences in individualism and collectivism operate as important predictors of people's city needs and goals. Individualism and collectivism are sociocultural orientations towards treating the self and others as individuals or group members respectively: Individualists see themselves and others as being self-reliant, autonomous, and independent, whereas collectivists are more interdependent and concerned about their social groups, including their family, friends, and community. We predicted that these dispositional orientations towards the self and others might also influence how people feel about cities.

To test our predictions, we asked 148 psychology undergraduate students to take virtual guided tours around one of four Utopian historical cities - cities that had never been built and were unfamiliar to our participants. YouTube videos of the four guided tours can be viewed here: Christianopolis, City of the Sun, New Harmony, and Victoria, and the picture below shows a scene from one of the tours. Participants then evaluated the cities’ liveability and environmental quality and completed measures of individualism and collectivism.

Consistent with our predictions, people with a strong sense of self-responsibility (a form of individualism) tended to evaluate the virtual cities in terms of their potential to meet the goal of acquiring resources, income, and wealth, whereas people with a strong sense of collectivism tended to evaluate the cities in terms of their potential to provide community and a sense of connection with others.

Scene from a virtual tour around the Utopian city of Victoria

To paraphrase Calvino (1978), city evaluation may be based on the answers that cities provide to our questions. However, our research suggests that different types of people have different types of questions. Individualists appear to ask: “can this city enhance my personal wealth?” whereas collectivists appear to ask: “can this city enhance my group’s community?”

These findings are important because they can help us to understand why some people choose to move into certain cities and others choose to leave. However, a key limitation of our work is that it lacked ecological validity because it involved nonresidents evaluating novel, historical, virtual, and unpopulated cities. In our future research, we intend to measure residents’ evaluations of more familiar, modern, real-world, populated cities.

For further information, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., & Morrison, T. (2014). Individual Differences in Individualism and Collectivism Predict Ratings of Virtual Cities’ Liveability and Environmental Quality The Journal of General Psychology, 141 (4), 348-372 DOI: 10.1080/00221309.2014.938721
 
A self-archived version of this journal article is available here.