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What Is Different Is Dangerous 215

ern nations what folktales are to traditional societies. Folktales have been

widely used by field anthropologists to infer motives of nonliterate peoples;
McClelland wanted to do the same for modern nations.
McClelland’s research team analyzed children’s stories from a large
number of countries dating from 1925 and from 1950. For each country
and either period, twenty-one stories were studied. Each story and each
country was scored on need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need

for power. McClelland’s own hypothesis was that the need for achievement
in children’s stories would predict a country’s rate of economic development
at the time when these children grew up. On this account later events did
not prove him right. A comparison of McClelland’s country scores with
the IBM dimension scores, however, revealed that the need for achieve-
ment as measured from 1925 children’s books (the more traditional ones)
was strongly correlated with weak uncertainty avoidance and even more
strongly with the combination of weak uncertainty avoidance and strong
masculinity. 46
This means that McClelland’s 1925 ranking of countries on their need
for achievement follows a diagonal line through Figure 6.1, from upper
right (strong need for achievement) to lower left (weak need for achieve-
ment). Low UAI means willingness to run unfamiliar risks, and high MAS

reflects the importance of visible results. Both are components of entrepre-
neurial activity in the American tradition. It should be no surprise that the
United States and the other Anglo countries in Figure 6.1 are to be found
in the upper right-hand quadrant, where UAI is low, MAS is high, and need
for achievement is strong. In choosing the achievement motive, the Ameri-
can McClelland has promoted a typical Anglo value complex to a universal
recipe for economic success. A French, Swedish, or Japanese researcher
would have been unlikely to conceive of a worldwide achievement motive.
Even the word achievement is difficult to translate in most languages other

than English. 47
Leaving McClelland’s work aside, the combination of cultural uncer-
tainty avoidance and masculinity-femininity in Figure 6.1 highlights
different motivation patterns for different clusters of countries. A point
of departure is the “hierarchy of human needs” formulated by Abraham
Maslow and referred to in Chapter 4. Maslow ordered needs from lower to
higher: physiological, safety and security, belongingness, esteem, and self-
actualization. Chapter 4 took issue with the individualistic assumptions
in putting self-actualization on top. In view of the cultural variety in the