Page 135 - Cultures and Organizations

114 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

The link between culture scores and language features illustrates the very
old roots of cultural differences. It is naive to expect present-day differ-
ences 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. 36
The same point was made by two U.S. psychologists, Hazel Rose
Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, the latter of Japanese descent. They argued
that 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 attri-
37
butes. 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.
U.S. psychologist Solomon E. Asch (1907–96) designed a rather nasty
experiment to test to what extent U.S. individuals would stick to their own
judgment against a majority. The subject believed he or she was a mem-
ber of a group of people who had to judge which of two lines was longer.
Unknown to the subject, all other group members were confederates of
the experimenter and deliberately gave a false answer. In this situation a
sizable percentage of the subjects conformed to the group opinion against
their own conviction. Since the 1950s, this experiment has been replicated
in a number of countries. The percentage of subjects conforming to the

false judgment was negatively correlated with the countries’ IDV score. 38
In Chapter 2 we referred to the relationship between personality and
national culture, established by correlating across thirty-three countries
the mean “Big Five” personality dimension scores with our culture dimen-
sion scores. There were significant correlations between country mean Big

Five scores and all four IBM culture dimensions, but the strongest cor-
39
relation was between extraversion and IDV. Extraversion (as opposed to
introversion) combines the following set of self-scored personality facets
that tend to go together: warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity,
excitement seeking, and positive emotions. What the correlations show