Individualism appears to have increased over the past several decades, yet most research documenting this shift has been limited to the study of a handful of highly developed countries. Is the world becoming more individualist as a whole? If so, why? To answer these questions, we examined 51 years of data on individualist practices and values across 78 countries. Our findings suggest that individualism is indeed rising in most of the societies we tested. Despite dramatic shifts toward greater individualism around the world, however, cultural differences remain sizable. Moreover, cultural differences are primarily linked to changes in socioeconomic development, and to a lesser extent to shifts in pathogen prevalence and disaster frequency.
DeatonA. (2008). Income, health, and well-being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(2), 53–72.
2.
GanzeboomH. B. G.TreimanD. J. (1996). Internationally comparable measures of occupational status for the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations. Social Science Research, 25, 201–239.
3.
GreenfieldP. M. (2009). Linking social change and developmental change: Shifting pathways of human development. Developmental Psychology, 45, 401–418. doi:10.1037/a0014726
4.
GreenfieldP. M. (2013). The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000. Psychological Science, 24, 1722–1731. doi:10.1177/0956797613479387
5.
GrossmannI.NaJ. (2014). Research in culture and psychology: Past lessons and future challenges. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 5, 1–14. doi:10.1002/wcs.1267
6.
GrossmannI.VarnumM. E. W. (2015). Social structure, infectious diseases, disasters, secularism, and cultural change in America. Psychological Science, 26, 311–324. doi:10.1177/0956797614563765
7.
Guha-SapirD.BelowR.HoyoisP. (2015). EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database. Retrieved from http://www.emdat.be/
8.
HamamuraT. (2012). Are cultures becoming individualistic? A cross-temporal comparison of individualism-collectivism in the United States and Japan. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 3–24. doi:10.1177/1088868311411587
9.
HofstedeG. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
10.
HoxJ. J. (2002). Multilevel analysis: Techniques and application. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
11.
InglehartR. F.BakerW. E. (2000). Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review, 65, 19–51. doi:10.2307/2657288
12.
InglehartR. F.OysermanD. (2004). Individualism, autonomy, self-expression: The human development syndrome. In VinkenH.SoetersJ.EsterP. (Eds.), Comparing cultures: Dimensions of culture in a comparative perspective (pp. 76–96). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
13.
KagitçibasiÇ. (2007). Family, self, and human development across cultures. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
14.
KashimaY. (2014). How can you capture cultural dynamics?Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 995. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00995
15.
KashimaY.KashimaE. S. (2003). Individualism, GNP, climate, and pronoun drop: Is individualism determined by affluence and climate, or does language use play a role?Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 34, 125–134. doi:10.1177/0022022102239159
16.
KitayamaS.ConwayL. G.PietromonacoP. R.ParkH.PlautV. C. (2010). Ethos of independence across regions in the United States: The production-adoption model of cultural change. The American Psychologist, 65, 559–574. doi:10.1037/a0020277
17.
KrausM. W.PiffP. K.Mendoza-DentonR.RheinschmidtM. L.KeltnerD. (2012). Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor. Psychological Review, 119, 546–572. doi:10.1037/a0028756
18.
MarkusH. R.KitayamaS. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.
MorlingB.LamoreauxM. (2008). Measuring culture outside the head: A meta-analysis of individualism-collectivism in cultural products. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12, 199–221. doi:10.1177/1088868308318260
MurrayD. R.TrudeauR.SchallerM. (2011). On the origins of cultural differences in conformity: Four tests of the pathogen prevalence hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 318–329. doi:10.1177/0146167210394451
23.
NakagawaS.SchielzethH. (2013). A general and simple method for obtaining R2 from generalized linear mixed-effects models. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 4, 133–142. doi:10.1111/j.2041-210x.2012.00261.x
24.
NewsonL.RichersonP. J. (2009). Why do people become modern? A Darwinian explanation. Population and Development Review, 35, 117–158. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2009.00263.x
25.
OgiharaY.FujitaH.TominagaH.IshigakiS.KashimotoT.TakahashiA., . . . UchidaY. (2015). Are common names becoming less common? The rise in uniqueness and individualism in Japan. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1490. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01490
26.
OishiS.GrahamJ. (2010). Social ecology: Lost and found in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 356–377. doi:10.1177/1745691610374588
27.
OishiS.KesebirS. (2012). Optimal social-networking strategy is a function of socioeconomic conditions. Psychological Science, 23, 1542–1548. doi:10.1177/0956797612446708
28.
R Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
29.
SchallerM.ParkJ. H. (2011). The behavioral immune system (and why it matters). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 99–103. doi:10.1177/0963721411402596
30.
SchimmackU.OishiS.DienerE. (2005). Individualism: A valid and important dimension of cultural differences between nations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 17–31. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0901_2
31.
TalhelmT.ZhangX.OishiS.ShiminC.DuanD.LanX.KitayamaS. (2014). Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. Science, 344, 603–608. doi:10.1126/science.1246850
32.
ThornhillR.FincherC. L. (2014). The parasite-stress theory of values and sociality. New York, NY: Springer.
33.
TriandisH. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism: New directions in social psychology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
34.
TriandisH. C. (2009). Ecological determinants of cultural variations. In WyerR. S.ChiuC.HongY.CohenD. (Eds.), Understanding culture: Theory, research and applications (pp. 189–210). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
35.
TwengeJ. M.CampbellW. K.GentileB. (2012). Generational increases in agentic self-evaluations among American college students, 1966–2009. Self and Identity, 11, 409–427. doi:10.1080/15298868.2011.576820
36.
TwengeJ. M.DawsonL.CampbellW. K. (2016). Still standing out: Children’s names in the United States during the Great Recession and correlations with economic indicators. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 46, 663–670. doi:10.1111/jasp.12409
37.
Van de VliertE. (2013). Climato-economic habitats support patterns of human needs, stresses, and freedoms. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 36, 465–480. doi:10.1017/S0140525X12002828
38.
VandelloJ. A.CohenD. (1999). Patterns of individualism and collectivism across the United States. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 279–292. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.77.2.279
39.
VarnumM. E. W.GrossmannI.KitayamaS.NisbettR. E. (2010). The origin of cultural differences in cognition: Evidence for the social orientation hypothesis. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 9–13. doi:10.1177/0963721409359301
40.
VignolesV. L.OweE.BeckerM.SmithP. B.EasterbrookM. J.BrownR.. . . BondM. H. (2016). Beyond the “east–west” dichotomy: Global variation in cultural models of selfhood. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 966–1000. doi:10.1037/xge0000175
41.
WachtelP. L. (1968). Anxiety, attention, and coping with threat. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 73, 137–143. doi:10.1037/h0020118
YamagishiT.HashimotoH.LiY.SchugJ. (2012). Stadtluft macht frei [City air brings freedom]. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 43, 38–45. doi:10.1177/0022022111415407
47.
YuF.PengT.PengK.TangS.ChenC. S.QianX.. . . ChaiF. (2016). Cultural value shifting in pronoun use. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 47, 310–316. doi:10.1177/0022022115619230
48.
ZengR.GreenfieldP. M. (2015). Cultural evolution over the last 40 years in China: Using the Google Ngram Viewer to study implications of social and political change for cultural values. International Journal of Psychology, 50, 47–55. doi:10.1002/ijop.12125
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
