Individualism-collectivism does not cleanly predict social identity use

Evidence

It is commonly assumed that self-concepts of people in individualist cultures primarily possess idiocentric traits and attributes, whereas collectivists’ selfconcepts incorporate more social references, including allocentric, relational constructs and group memberships (Triandis, 1989). But empirical data have provided mixed support for this claim: while some studies showed that collectivists generate a larger proportion of social identity references (e.g., Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002; Triandis et al., 1990), other studies found that U.S. respondents use an equal, or sometimes greater, proportion of social descriptors than respondents from Japan, China, or Korea (e.g., Bond & Cheung, 1983; Rhee, Uleman, Lee, & Roman, 1995). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1625

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what explains the contradictory findings — method differences, self-report framing, or a real heterogeneity in these cultures?
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self”