Regional differences in individualism and why they matter.

Abstract

Humans like freedom. All things being equal, they prefer to be able to choose where to eat, how to vote, what brand of peanut butter to buy, who to marry, and whether to take a walk on a fall morning. When people feel like they have no freedom as an individual, they often take steps to reassert that freedom and, if that fails, they frequently become depressed and unhappy. No one wants to feel like they are constrained in a prison.But individual freedom has some downsides. People must live in proximity to other people, and sometimes individual freedom can clash with the collective good. I may want to walk into a store and take all the peanut butter for myself without paying for it, but my individual freedom to do that would almost certainly hurt a lot of other people. It is hard for any society to function allowing limitless freedom. No one wants to live in a place where their neighbor has the freedom to take their peanut butter or their farm equipment or their cat or their children when they do not want them to. REgIoNAl DIffERENCEs IN INDIvIDuAlIsm AND WHy THEy mATTER luCIAN gIDEoN CoNWAy III, sHANNoN C. HouCk, AND lAuRA JANEllE goRNICk It's easy to curb the freedoms of others when you see no immediate impact on your own. -malcolm forbes (as cited in scott, 2008, p. 114)

Personality and geography: Introverts prefer mountains

“…Next, we examined whether our findings are confounded with individualism because Conway et al (2014) found that mountainousness was associated with individualism, and Hofstede and McCrae (2004) found that individualism is associated with extraversion at least at the level of nation. At the level of U.S. states, however, individualism was not associated with extraversion, r(48) = .09, p = .55.…”

“…In addition, previous research found that mountainousness was associated with individualism (Conway, Houck, & Gornick, 2014; see also Kitayama, Conway, Pietromonaco, Park, & Plaut, 2010 for a conceptual model). Thus, we also controlled for individualism-collecti vism at the state level (Vandello & Cohen, 1999).…”

Focusing on the negative: Cultural differences in expressions of sympathy.

“…To derive an overall frontier value score , we first aggregated responses to “successful (achieving goals),” “capable (competent, effective, efficient),” “ambitious (hardworking, aspiring),” “influential (having an impact on people and events),” and “intelligent (logical, thinking)” to derive an “achievement value score” based on Schwartz (2012) (Cronbach's alpha = .74 for European Americans, .72 for Germans). We then aggregated responses to “unity with nature (fitting into nature)” and “protecting the environment (preserving nature),” to derive a “fitting into nature value score”, which we viewed as the opposite of a willingness to overcome and master nature (Conway et al, 2014) (Cronbach's alpha =.85 for European Americans, .74 for Germans). Because we wanted to capture how much people value achievement compared to how much they value fitting into nature, we then subtracted the “fitting into nature” value score from the “achievement” value score to create an overall frontier value score.…”

“…According to the “voluntary settlement hypothesis” (e.g., Kitayama, Ishii, Imada, Takemura, & Ramaswamy, 2006; Kitayama, Park, Sevincer, Karasawa, & Uskul, 2009), the traits and values of these early settlers became the basis of American independence and individualism (Lipset, 1997; Wilson, 2008). Several scholars have referred to these traits as the “frontier spirit” (“American Frontier” Spirit; Turner, 1921), which included not only a desire to escape one's negative circumstances to achieve one's dreams but also a willingness to tame and master the wilderness of the New World in order to do so (Conway, Houck, & Gornick, 2014). In his book, “ The Frontier Spirit and Progress ,” historian Tucker (1980) defined frontiers as “those areas in which men are most dynamically in motion to master the environment” (p. 4).…”

Automated Integrative Complexity: Current Challenges and Future Directions

“…It is possible that such systems can continue to coexist side‐by‐side and, as such, offer useful independent insights into the nature of complex rhetoric. There is indeed value in having such independent measurements: To the degree that they measure somewhat different aspects of complexity, they can help us better understand the overarching relation of complexity to human psychology by the principle of triangulation (see, e.g., Conway, Houck, & Gornick, in press; Kitayama, Conway, Pietromonaco, Park, & Plaut, ). Removing such variability in favor of a single approach or system might in fact stagnate science by unnecessarily restricting the possible dimensions or facets of a clearly multifaceted construct.…”