Contextualism as an Important Facet of Individualism-Collectivism

Abstract

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultural collectivism. A brief measure was developed and refined across 19 nations (Study 1: N = 5,241), showing good psychometric properties for cross-cultural use and correlating well at the nation level with other supposed facets and indicators of I-C. In Study 2 (N = 8,652), nation-level contextualism predicted ingroup favoritism, corruption, and differential trust of ingroup and outgroup members, while controlling for other facets of I-C, across 35 nations. We conclude that contextualism is an important part of cultural collectivism. This highlights the importance of beliefs alongside values and selfrepresentations and contributes to a wider understanding of cultural processes.

Cross-Cultural Evidence for Spatial Bias in Beliefs About the Severity of Environmental Problems

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Fragility of Happiness Beliefs Across 15 National Groups

“…The tests for metric and scalar invariance are calculated by imposing equality constraints on factor loadings and intercepts of the baseline model. When a large number of groups are involved (as is the case with the present study), the procedure generally used to establish invariance is to evaluate the fit of the more constrained model as a stand-alone model (e.g., Davidov et al 2008;Owe et al 2013). If the more constrained model fits the data well, invariance is supported.…”

“…With these sample sizes, it is most appropriate to evaluate the correlations in terms of size and direction rather than significance Owe et al 2013). Culture-level correlations are presented in Table 7.…”

Beyond the ‘east–west’ dichotomy: Global variation in cultural models of selfhood.

“…Overcoming earlier shortcomings, we used a more adequate item pool, a broader range of cultural samples, and appropriate statistical analyses, to guide the development of a cross-culturally valid theoretical model of variation in selfconstrual. Study 1 was part of a larger multinational research project into culture and identity processes (M. Becker et al, 2012Becker et al, , 2014Owe et al, 2013;Vignoles & Brown, 2011). We created a pool of 62 self-construal items, designed to represent as fully as possible the ways of being "independent" or "interdependent" identified in previous theoretical discussions and measures of self-construals, and we explored the dimensionality of responses to these items from almost 3000 adolescents residing in 16 nations spanning Western and Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America.…”