East Asian collectivism and Western social identity processes operate on different logics

Evidence

My personal understanding of social identity theory started with an episode that occurred in 1997, shortly after I joined Marilynn’s lab as a self-funded postdoc. Fresh from Japan, the “kingdom of collectivism,” I had arrived in Marilynn’s lab with the hope that social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), the de facto standard theory of group processes then, would be useful in understanding group behavior in my culture. However, applying social identity theory to the Japanese group behavior I was familiar with did not come as easily as I had first thought. Marilynn largely disagreed nearly every time we engaged in discussion to the point that we were, oftentimes, at a complete loss as to what the other was talking about. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1594

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my interest in how measures and theories export across cultures without grounding.