The importance and impact of culture is not lost on business schools, but how does new research on collectivism impact teaching and research?

Thomas Talhelm, Robert Cialdini Endowed Professor of Social Influence at Arizona State University, has just published new research on why people (and academia’s most-used surveys) get collectivism wrong and how to fix it, in Nature Human Behaviour. We speak with him to find out more:

What made you want to take a closer look at how collectivism is measured?

It all goes back to a puzzle I learned when I was a young undergraduate research assistant, helping some of the giants in the field of cultural psychology. One of the things they taught me was to not use surveys to measure collectivism because they “don’t work.” What they meant was that they produce strange results, like Americans scoring more collectivistic than Japan or people in China valuing independence more than Americans. It was a real puzzle, and it persisted for over 30 years.  

In simple terms, what is “responsibilism”, and how is it different from collectivism?

Responsibilism is about concrete duties in close relationships, like family and tight friends. In some ways, it’s the opposite of how people often think about collectivism as a sort of utopian socialist world, where people are warm to everyone, with big groups and solidarity–workers of the world unite! I call that “warm fuzzy” collectivism. 

What do these findings tell us about how people approach relationships and responsibilities in different cultures?

We gave questions about responsibilism and “warm fuzzy” collectivism to over 12,000 people in 100 cultures around the world, from Greenland to Madagascar. For example, we asked people how much they’d agree with responsibilistic ideas like “We should keep our ageing parents with us at home” and warm, fuzzy ideas like “To me, pleasure is spending time with others.” In people’s responses, these two approaches were opposites. People in cultures that people have been describing as collectivistic for decades (like China and Ghana) agreed most with the responsibism items. And people in individualistic Western cultures like the US, Sweden, and Australia agreed most with the warm fuzzy items.   

And that was the key to the 30 years of puzzling findings. The surveys researchers had been using to measure collectivism all these years combined those two versions of collectivism, even though they’re actually opposites.  

How might these cultural differences shape the way people work and collaborate in teams?

One dividing line across cultures is quick trust. We asked people around the world to imagine that they’re sitting outside an office, waiting for a meeting to start, when a co-worker they never met before starts asking them about the project they’re working on. Our question was: Would you share the details with the co-worker? Or should you be careful in this situation?  

People in warm fuzzy cultures tended to say they’d share openly. Why not? We’re on the same big team. But people in responsibilistic cultures were wary. I think people’s reaction is more like, “Hang on, I don’t really know you. What’s your intention here?”  

This sort of collaboration with weak ties comes easier for people in Western, warm fuzzy cultures. But in responsibilistic cultures, that collaboration needs more of a foundation. If you want people to form teams, they need to know each other first. There needs to be that scaffolding in place before people will put their cards on the table.  

What could this mean for managers working with international and culturally diverse teams?

I think this basic way of seeing the world–responsibilism versus warm fuzzy collectivism–maps onto a lot of divides in everyday life, not just across oceans. In our data, responsibilism was higher among people from working-class backgrounds. It was also higher among people who are more politically conservative. If you let these ideas sit in your head for a day or two, I think you’ll start to see them in everyday life.

So if you’re a manager, you’ll probably start to see that some people care more about concrete behaviors and responsibilities, whereas other people care more about broad relationships and feelings. You’ll see some people connect easily with strangers, whereas other people treat the world with more caution. If you can understand these approaches, you can design systems that take these approaches into account.  

Does your research suggest that organisations should be more cautious about making broad assumptions about people based on their nationality and culture?

It’s always best to understand individuals on their own terms. When in doubt, ask! We found meaningful differences between cultures, but that still leaves plenty of differences within cultures. There were participants in China who scored as low as participants in the US and vice versa.  

That said, I think one of the more interesting findings in the paper is how much variation can be explained by thinking about the world in three boxes. With all the survey data, we ran an analysis asking how much we could predict about individual survey responses if we know which of 100 cultures the participant was in (Turkey, China, Argentina, and so on). The answer was 32%–about a third of the variation just from knowing which culture they’re in.  

But then we asked a more extreme question. What if all we know about each participant is whether they’re from a Western culture (like the US and Norway), a non-Western culture (like Ghana and Mongolia), or what I call a “sometimes Western” culture (like Russia and Brazil, which sit in this cultural middle zone). So we’re going from 100 groups down to just three. That’s it. It’d be reasonable to expect that that just slams how much predictive power we have close to zero. Maybe it goes from 32% to 10%? 5%?  

The real result was 25%. The difference in how well we can predict people’s responses from just these three cultural groups fell only a little bit. In other words, there are these broad cultural groupings out there. There’s a reason people often talk about Western and non-Western cultures. These groupings are coarse. They paper over tons of legitimate differences. But they’re also useful categories.   

The individual is still king. Get to know who you’re talking to. That always trumps cultural groups. But the data suggests these cultural groups are a useful starting hypothesis that we can refine as we get more data about individuals. I think that’s a useful, pragmatic way to think about our complex cultural world.  

What could business schools take from this research when teaching students about culture, leadership and international management?

One of the important take-home messages from the data actually comes from the survey of researchers. We showed researchers survey questions like “We should keep our ageing parents with us at home” and “I feel good when I cooperate with others,” and we asked them to guess whether people in individualistic (the US) or collectivistic (China) cultures agreed more. The researchers often expected that people in China would agree more with both types of statements.

There’s a lesson in that. There are two versions of collectivism that are actually at odds with each other. The responsibilistic version largely maps onto cultural differences that people are trying to describe. But the warm fuzzy items often show the opposite pattern–people in cultures like the US and Germany agree more with these “feel good” items than people in cultures like Japan and Zambia. If there’s one take-home message I want to leave people with, it’s to remember that these two versions of collectivism are opposites. Don’t fall for the trap of warm fuzzy collectivism! 

Looking ahead, what do you hope this research changes about the way we study and understand culture in organisations?

I think this research can help give people a framework for understanding things that people often get wrong about collectivistic cultures–findings that seem paradoxical. For example, one study asked people to imagine a co-worker all of a sudden offers to help with a work project, like coding a program. People in China were more likely than people in the US to suspect that attempt to help was actually an opportunity for sabotage. Maybe they’d secretly insert errors into the code so that you’d get demoted and they’d succeed.  

Similarly, a study asked people in the US and Ghana whether they have an enemy in their social circle. In the US, 17% said “yes.” In Ghana, it was 79%. That’s what people misunderstand about collectivism. It’s about having to be around other people and work with them. It’s not about having warm feelings or even feeling trust in them. Distinguishing between warm fuzzy collectivism and responsibilism can help people avoid these sorts of misunderstandings and design work cultures that start from the right foundation.  

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