The individualist-collectivist split in self-description receives only mixed empirical support

Evidence

The most direct method to investigate different cultures’ social identities is to assess their spontaneous self-descriptions. 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: A caution against too clean a cognitive dichotomy in the prejudice literature — if the classic self-concept findings themselves are murky, group-mechanism claims built atop them need rechecking.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1625