An Empirical Study On Different Tendencies Toward Individualism And Collectivism

With the fast speed of globalization and the increasingly close contacts between countries, the people in the world today get more and more opportunities to communicate with foreigners from different cultural backgrounds than ever before. In the process of inter-cultural communication, a common view that no countries can separate from the outside contacts and manage to take a stand in the world has been well established among the people of the world. Therefore inter-cultural communication today is becoming more and more frequent and abundant. In addition, the study in the field of the inter-cultural communication is also in full swing.As early as in1980, Hofstede made a groundbreaking research in the field of cross-cultural communication and identified four dimensions to compare cultural differences, among which I-C (individualism-collectivism) has been paid special attention to by many scholars. In addition, most of them followed Hofstede’s theory and considered that I-C is a bipolar dimension, with collectivism on the one end and individualism on the opposite end. However, Triandis (1991) concluded that two orientations at I-C dimension not only existed between cultures but also within one culture, one society or even within an individual.In the theoretical framework of Hofstede and Triandis, the present thesis tries to testify Hofstede’s viewpoint of Chinese culture in the I-C dimension and explore the different tendencies toward I-C by different groups of people at different layers.The study adopts the self-made questionnaire based on the related discussions of I-C theory of Hofstede and Triandis and the group interviews and conducts a survey of218subjects. The collected data is analyzed with the help of SPSS.The study reveals the following results:1) Chinese show a strong tendency toward collectivism on the whole.2) Compared with males, females show a stronger tendency toward collectivism not only in general but also at the family and friend layers.3) Middle-aged people show a stronger tendency toward collectivism than the young. The older the subjects are, the more collectivistic they are; the younger the subjects are, the more individualistic they are. At the family level, the post-1970s tend to be the most individualistic compared with the other three age groups of people.4) Compared with people with higher education, at the country layer, the people with secondary education tend to be more collectivistic while at the individual life layer, they show a stronger tendency toward individualism. In spite of the achievements mentioned above, there are still some limitations in the aspects of the instruments and the subjects. As an exploratory study, the findings can prove the scientificity of Triandis’ I-C theory and Hofstede’s conclusion that China largely belongs to collectivistic culture. Furthermore, the results may also help to get rid of the westerners’ stereotype about Chinese and enhance the understanding of Chinese culture.