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Language, Personality, and Behaviour






Languages spoken in individualist cultures tend to require speakers to use the " I" pronoun when referring to themselves; languages spoken in collectivist cultures allow or prescribe dropping this pronoun (for example, " I love you" in Spanish: te quire rather than yo te quiero). The English language, spoken in the most individualist countries, is the only one we know of that writes " I" with a capital letter.

Languages change over time, but only slowly. The first-person singular pronoun was used in Western European languages in medieval poetry. An Arab saying dating from the same period is " The satanic ‘I’ be damned! " This example shows the very old roots of cultural differences. It is naive to expect present-day differences to disappear over anybody's lifetime.

The Chinese-American anthropologist Francis Hsu has argued that the Chinese language has no equivalent for personality in the Western sense. Personality in the West is a separate entity, distinct from society and culture: it is an attribute of the individual. The closest translation into Chinese is ren, but this word includes not only the individual but also the intimate societal and cultural environment that makes his or her existence meaningful.

Many Asian cultures have conceptions of individuality that insist on the fundamental relatedness of individuals to each other, while in America individuals seek to maintain their independence from others by focusing on the self and by discovering and expressing their unique inner attributes. The way people experience the self differs with the culture. In our interpretation, individualist cultures encourage an independent self, while collectivist cultures encourage an interdependent self.

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There were found significant correlations on the Big Five scores and all four IBM culture dimensions, but the strongest correlation was between extraversion and individualism. Extraversion (as opposed to introversion) combines the following set of self-scored personality facets that tend to go together: warmth, socialbelness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking, and positive emotions. On average, people in more individualist cultures rate themselves higher on these facets than people in more collectivist cultures. It may seem surprising that people in cultures that encourage an independent self tend to score themselves higher on sociabelness, but it is precisely when relationships between people are not prescribed by the culture that the conscious decision to get together becomes more important.

Individualist cultures encourage the showing of happiness but discourage the sharing of sadness; collectivist cultures do the opposite.

 

An investigation on the pace of life, revealed that walking speed turned out to be strongly correlated with individualism. People in individualist cultures tended to walk faster. We interpret this result as a physical expression of their self-concept: people in more individualist cultures are more active in trying to get somewhere.

Powerful information about differences in behavior across countries can be obtained from consumer surveys. There were found many meaningful correlations between consumer behavior data and individualism. Persons in high-individualistic countries were more likely than those in low-individualistic countries to live in detached houses versus apartments or flats. They were more likely to have a private garden and to own a caravan (mobile home) for leisure. They more frequently had dogs as pets and especially cats, as measured by household consumption of pet food. (Cats are more individualistic animals than dogs!) They were more likely to possess home and life insurance. They more often engaged in do-it-yourself activities: painting walls and woodwork, wallpapering, home carpentry, electrical upgrades and repairs, and plumbing projects. In all these cases individualism explained the country differences better than national wealth. They all suggest a lifestyle in which the person tries to be self-supporting and not dependent on others.

In matters of information, persons in high-individualistic countries read more books, and they were more likely to own a personal computer and a telephone with voice mail. People in high-individualistic countries more often rated TV advertising useful for information about new products. They relied more on media and less on their social networks.

There is no indication that inhabitants of countries with individualist cultures are healthier or unhealthier than those from countries with collectivist ones, but the fact that individualistic people are more focused on the self, is visible in a greater concern for their own health than is found in collectivistic cultures. Governments of the same countries also spend a larger share of public budgets on health care.

Individualist and collectivist cultures deal differently with disability. In the individualist communities (Anglo and German), people with disabilities tended to remain cheerful and optimistic, to resent dependency and being helped, and to plan for a future life as normal as possible. In the collectivist communities (Greek, Chinese, Arabic), there would be more expression of grief, shame, and pessimism; family members would be asked for advice and assistance, and they would make the main decisions about the person's future.


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