Authored by Miles Thompson, Rachel Peal, and Ada Toprak.
You may have heard that Western cultures are individualistic and Eastern cultures are collectivist. So had we. So we set out to explore the research behind these ideas to see what it might teach us about our wider project, which is using psychology to help bring about a better world. In short, while the above distinction captures something real, we also came to understand that the underlying research is more complicated and nuanced than the simple statement above suggests.
The labels individualism and collectivism tend to be applied to whole countries or even global regions. By way of illustration, and using stereotypical examples, individualistic societies are generally associated with “the West” (e.g., the United States). They tend to have a greater emphasis on personal autonomy and individual goals, with individuals relying less on each other. Japan or China, on the other hand, are stereotypically used as exemplars of more collectivist societies. In these societies, individuals tend to be more interdependent, and group relationships and obligations are given greater importance.
Foundations
Individualism-collectivism research is often traced back to Geert Hofstede (1928-2020). Hofstede’s original work in the late 1960s and early 1970s used factor analysis to examine the results of a global survey of employee work values, conducted within IBM (International Business Machines). This research gathered data from mainly skilled, educated, middle-class employees working for a single multinational technology company in different locations around the world (Hofstede, 1980). This raises sampling questions, both in terms of who was sampled and the extent to which that data can represent national cultures.
Hofstede’s original framework included four dimensions of culture; later versions included six, of which individualism-collectivism is only one. Among the many items included in the survey, six came to be associated with the individualism-collectivism dimension. Here, participants were asked about factors they would like to see in an ideal job. The three individualism items focused on (i) having a job that allows time for personal and family life, (ii) having freedom within your job, and (iii) having challenging work resulting in a sense of accomplishment. The three collectivism items focused on having (i) training opportunities, (ii) good physical working conditions, and (iii) the scope for fully using your skills and abilities (Hofstede, 1980).
Potential issues
Naturally, researchers have noted that the above items appear much more narrowly focused than the overarching ideas of individualism and collectivism presented earlier. This raises questions of “face validity.” In other words, do questionnaire items appear to measure what they claim to measure? There is also a related question concerning the leap from responses about workplace preferences and opportunities to conclusions about a national culture.
A large volume of research has since been produced on this topic. However, there is still no single, universally accepted definition or measurement of individualism and collectivism. Different studies approach the terms in different ways. Moreover, researchers disagree about how the two concepts relate to each other: Are they opposite ends of a single continuum, separate dimensions, or orientations that can coexist within the same person or society?
Researchers have long noted the difficulty of reducing the complexity of a national culture into one of two categories and/or a single continuum. Even mapping individualism-collectivism onto “East-West,” another problematic shorthand, raises questions. Making reductions like these (individualism-collectivism or East-West) risks treating different societies or regions, and the variations within them, as single, fixed units.
Moreover, even within a country, social and demographic variations such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, generation, and political group membership may promote different values and ways of relating to each other. A country’s average score cannot, by itself, tell us how any particular individual thinks, feels, or behaves. Assuming that an individual shares the characteristics of their country’s average is an example of something known as the “ecological fallacy.”
These issues also matter when researchers use national individualism-collectivism scores to help explain other country-level outcomes, such as levels of well-being or social trust. Indeed, some researchers suggest that some of the potential issues above need to be carefully considered when interpreting research that explores these kinds of relationships (Oyserman et al., 2002; Voronov & Singer, 2002).
A recent example
To give an example of the complexity of researching this area, Lomas and colleagues (2023) explored a concept they thought would relate to individualism-collectivism: “self-care” versus “other-care.” They analysed data from more than 120,000 people across 116 countries collected through the Gallup World Poll. The question asked was: “Do you think people should focus more on taking care of themselves or on taking care of others?”
Using the study’s own East-West groupings, and contrary to expectations that self-care would be more associated with individualism, respondents in “the East” put more importance on self-care than respondents in “the West.” The researchers wondered if (i) this might suggest that countries in the East are more individualistic than those in the West; (ii) self-care might not map onto individualism-collectivism; (iii) part of collectivism might include looking after yourself, as part of caring for the wider community; and (iv) self-care and other-care may carry different meanings in different cultural contexts.
As part of the same study, the researchers also asked about self-orientation versus other-orientation. Here, the data followed the researchers’ expected pattern: self-orientation was more common in the West than the East.
What the evidence does and does not support
The individualism-collectivism distinction is a helpful orienting framework. But after decades of research, the evidence does not justify treating individualism-collectivism as a simple, fixed property of whole countries, still less as a description of any one individual within it.
Many have argued that Hofstede’s original individualism-collectivism work contains limitations. In response, researchers have revised, refined, and expanded the framework in different ways. Some are making substantial revisions to the original core variables; others are working to move beyond simple dichotomies, embracing more fluid, multidimensional dynamics; and others are more gently modifying the original dimension, using updated data and measures (Komisarof & Akaliyski, 2025; Uskul & Mesquita, 2026).
Countries do vary in terms of cultural values broadly captured by terms like individualism-collectivism. But how these terms are defined, measured, and relate to each other still seems to be up for debate. Moreover, focusing on individualism-collectivism alone risks overlooking other important cultural dimensions. The more we simplify and reduce, the more we seem to risk losing rather than gaining.
Equally, and notwithstanding all the above, one study examining 51 years of data from 78 countries found that individualistic practices and values had increased in most of the societies studied (Santos et al., 2017). That said, this does not mean that all societies are changing in the same way, nor that they are becoming culturally identical.
What could we conclude?
As measuring even simple aspects of individual human behaviour is complicated, measuring more nuanced aspects of national culture—like individualism-collectivism—is more challenging still, especially if our core definitions and the relationships between terms are not yet fully agreed upon. Without strong foundations, future conclusions risk not standing up to the test of time. This is potentially a wider issue in psychology, where attractive concepts become widely used before their assumptions and measurements are fully understood. Attractive categories help us begin thinking. But problems can arise when we mistake the map for the territory.
