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I, We, and They 129

sequences for development assistance to poor countries and for economic
globalization. There is a dire need for alternative economic theories that
take into account cultural differences on this dimension.
The degree of individualism or collectivism of a society affects the con-
ceptions of human nature produced in that society. In the United States the
ideas of Abraham Maslow (1908–70) about human motivation have been and

are still influential, in particular for the training of management students
and practitioners. Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of human needs” states that
human needs can be ordered in a hierarchy from lower to higher, as fol-
lows: physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. 56
In order for a higher need to appear, it is necessary that the lower needs have

been satisfied up to a certain extent. A starving person, one whose physi-

ological needs are not at all satisfied, will not be motivated by anything
other than the quest for food, and so forth. The top of Maslow’s hierarchy,
often pictured as a pyramid, is occupied by the motive of self-actualization:
realizing to the fullest possible extent the creative potential present within
the individual. This means doing one’s own thing. It goes without saying
that this can be the supreme motivation only in an individualist society. In
a collectivist culture, what will be actualized is the interest and honor of
the in-group, which may very well ask for self-effacement from many of the
in-group members. The interpreter for a group of young Americans visiting
China in the late 1970s found the idea of “doing your own thing” untrans-
latable into Chinese. Harmony and consensus are more attractive ultimate
goals for such societies than individual self-actualization.

Since Culture’s Consequences first appeared in 1980, the individualism-
collectivism dimension has gained much popularity among psychologists,
especially those from the economically emerging Asian nations. The
dimension implies that traditional psychology is as little a universal science
as traditional economics: it is a product of Western thinking, caught in

individualist assumptions. When these assumptions are replaced by more
collectivist assumptions, another psychology emerges, and it differs from
the former in important respects. For example, as we discussed earlier in
this chapter, individualist psychology is universalist, opposing the “ego”
to any “other.” In collectivist psychology, the ego is inseparable from its
social context. People in collectivist societies make exclusionist distinc-
tions: the in-group, which includes the ego, is opposed to all out-groups.