American and East Asian collectivism differ in kind, not degree.

Evidence

Overall, the above evidence supports my original claim that the kinds, not the levels, of collectivism are different between North America and East Asia. More specifically, North Americans tend to define groups in terms of shared features among group members, to have a depersonalized view of the self as a prototypical exemplar of the in-group, and to be motivated to gain higher intergroup status. On the contrary, East Asians conceptualize groups in terms of shared interpersonal networks among group members, perceive the self as a distinctive but constitutive part of the network, and are motivated to maintain harmonious and reciprocal relationships between the members (Yuki, 2003). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1639

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Complements the distinction in Communication as Culture and social capital literature where East Asian networks are relational rather than categorical.
• DEFINE: Defines the essential reframing: collectivism split into ‘shared-features’ grouping vs. ‘network-based’ grouping rather than a single scalar trait.

Related

• Western and East Asian collectivism are qualitatively different phenomena (similarity 0.95)
• North Americans are no less collectivistic than East Asians (similarity 0.86)
• East Asian collectivism and Western social identity processes operate on different logics (similarity 0.84)
• In-group-out-group cognition is mainly a Western pattern, not universal (similarity 0.83)
• Asian selves are defined chiefly by their web of significant relationships (similarity 0.82)
• In-groups can cohere by homogeneity or by shared structure (similarity 0.81)
• Individualism-collectivism does not cleanly predict social identity use (similarity 0.80)
• The individualist-collectivist split in self-description receives only mixed empirical support (similarity 0.78)