Outside the "Cultural Binary": Understanding Why Latin American Collectivist Societies Foster Independent Selves

Abstract

Cultural psychologists often treat binary contrasts of West versus East, individualism versus collectivism, and independent versus interdependent self-construal as interchangeable, thus assuming that collectivist societies promote interdependent rather than independent models of selfhood. At odds with this assumption, existing data indicate that Latin American societies emphasize collectivist values at least as strongly as Confucian East Asian societies, but they emphasize most forms of independent self-construal at least as strongly as Western societies. We argue that these seemingly "anomalous" findings can be explained by societal differences in modes of subsistence (herding vs. rice farming), colonial histories (frontier settlement), cultural heterogeneity, religious heritage, and societal organization (relational mobility, loose norms, honor logic) and that they cohere with other indices of contemporary psychological culture. We conclude that the common view linking collectivist values with interdependent self-construal needs revision. Global cultures are diverse, and researchers should pay more attention to societies beyond "the West" and East Asia. Our contribution concurrently illustrates the value of learning from unexpected results and the crucial importance of exploratory research in psychological science.

Keywords: Latin American culture; collectivism; cultural binary; cultural models of selfhood; independent self-construal; individualism; interdependent self-construal.

Fig. 1.

Locations for which self-construals were studied. Results were quantified on the basis of all articles indexed in EBSCO that mention the term “self-construal” and a name of any country in a title or abstract. For details of our analyses, see Section S1 and Tables S1 through S3 in the Supplemental Material.

Fig. 2.

Rescaled independent self-construal country averages graphed as a function of Hofstede’s measure of individualism, separately for countries from three different cultural regions (Northwestern European heritage, Latin America, and Confucian East Asia). The plot shows that Latin American societies, although collectivistic, foster independent self-construal. For details of our analyses, see Section S3 and Table S5 in the Supplemental Material available online.

Fig. 3.

A comparison of samples from Latin American societies, Confucian Asian societies, and societies of Northwestern European (“Western”) heritage on the seven dimensions of self-construal measured by Vignoles et al. (2016). For each dimension, the box shows the interquartile range (IQR), the horizontal bar indicates the median, the square shows the mean, the whiskers go out to the most extreme data points that fall within 1.5× the IQR below the 25th percentile and above the 75th percentile, and the circles indicate observed values that fall outside this range (i.e., outliers). Higher scores indicate higher independence (vs. interdependence). The plot shows that there are differences between Latin America and Confucian Asia on five of the seven measured dimensions. For further details and tests of statistical significance, see Section S3 and Table S5 in the Supplemental Material.

Fig. 4.

A comparison of data from Latin American societies, Confucian Asian societies, and societies of Northwestern European (“Western”) heritage on many characteristics that could potentially account for the prevalence of independent forms of self-construal. For each dimension, the box shows the interquartile range (IQR), the horizontal bar indicates the median, the square shows the mean, the whiskers go out to the most extreme data points that fall within 1.5× the IQR below the 25th percentile and above the 75th percentile, and the circles indicate observed values that fall outside this range (i.e., outliers). For further details and tests of statistical significance, see Section S4 and Table S6 in the Supplemental Material.

Fig. 5.

A comparison of data from Latin American societies, Confucian Asian societies, and societies of Northwestern European (“Western”) heritage across six indicators of individualist versus collectivist cultural values. For each dimension, the box shows the interquartile range (IQR), the horizontal bar indicates the median, the square shows the mean, the whiskers go out to the most extreme data points that fall within 1.5× the IQR below the 25th percentile and above the 75th percentile, and the circles indicate observed values that fall outside this range (i.e., outliers). The plot shows that Latin American and Confucian East Asian societies share relatively collectivist values compared with Western societies. For further details and tests of statistical significance, see Supplement S4 and Table S6 in the Supplemental Material.