Page 133 - Cultures and Organizations

112 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

between families, not individuals. The bride and groom may have little say
in the choice of a partner. This does not mean that such marriages are less
happy. Research in India has shown more marital satisfaction in arranged
than in love marriages and more in Indian love marriages than in Ameri-
can marriages. While cultural individualism fosters the valuing of roman-
31
tic love, it can make developing intimacy problematic. In a survey about
the role of love in marriage, answered by female and male undergraduate
students in eleven countries, one question was: “If a man (woman) had all
the other qualities you desired, would you marry this person if you were
not in love with him (her)?” The answers varied with the degree of indi-
vidualism in the eleven societies, from 4 percent “yes” and 86 percent “no”
in the United States to 50 percent “yes” and 39 percent “no” in Pakistan. 32
In collectivist societies, other considerations than love weigh heavily in
marriage.
In 2005 a New York–based market research company studied the ide-

als of beauty and body image among fifteen- to seventeen-year-old girls,
through telephone interviews in cities in ten countries around the world:
Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Saudi
Arabia, and the United States. One question asked who had the most pow-

erful influence on their beauty ideals. In collectivist cultures, the respon-
dents most often referred to girlfriends—their in-group; in individualist
cultures, they most often referred to boys (in general). 33
Table 4.2 summarizes the key differences between collectivist and
individualist societies described so far.

Language, Personality, and Behavior in
Individualist and Collectivist Cultures

A Japanese-Australian couple, Yoshi and Emiko Kashima, he a psycholo-

gist, she a linguist, studied the relationship between culture and language.
Among other features of languages, they studied pronoun drop, the practice of

omitting the first-person singular pronoun (“I”) from a sentence (for exam-
ple, “I love you” in Spanish: te quiero rather than yo te quiero). They included
thirty-nine languages used in seventy-one countries and looked for correla-
tions with a number of other variables. The strongest correlation they found
34
was with IDV. 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. The