Collectivism And Individualism

To begin with, the notion of the individualism is rather ambiguous as it includes a lot of different behavioural patterns. One more difficulty about the individualism is that it can be considered on different levels of human groups - on the individual, group, societal and cultural levels in particular. What is more, one of the most popular application of the notion of the individualism is its analyses on the level of a culture as a trait of a whole society. However, in order to understand the specialities of its revelations on the societal level, it is important to consider different processes of its construction.

To move on, the study of collectivism and individualism as cultural syndromes by Harry Triandis in the paper “ Collectivism

However, those lines should not be strict determinants by which we label the Western cultures as such because in the globalised world the geography and values are not of that meaning as they were before when the mobility of people and ideas was restricted by the lack of the appropriate

The human development syndrome” stresses the economic reasons for the development of the individualistic cultures. (Inglehart & Oyserman, 2004) The matter is that the scientists made this assumption on the basis of the analyses of the measurement of the individualism and collectivism, the autonomy and embeddedness, survival and self-expression values on the wide range of countries. Their analyses allowed them to conclude that the cultures become more individualistic when the need for survival in them is satisfied, so the need for self-development appears. The last one establishes the priority of the individual choice over the survival needs, which is one of the distinctive traits of the individualist cultures. As the time series were used in this study, the scientists made an assumption that all the cultures can change over time which depends on the socioeconomic changes. Another important finding of this study is the connection between the individualism and the democracy. The matter is that the more the values of self-expression become widespread in the society, the more it contribute to the democratic rule in it. So, as the economic development contributes to the establishment of the individualistic societies it also contributes to their democratisation.