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The subject of this study and its importance
In 1980, Dutch Organizational Psychologist Geert Hofstede published a book in which he reduced national culture to four dimensions (Hofstede, 1980). One of these was individualism vs collectivism (IDV-COLL), a dimension of national culture that is strongly correlated with national wealth and, therefore, highlights cultural differences between economically advanced nations and those with less advanced economies. It is important to note that IDV-COLL is a continuum, not a dichotomy, meaning that each nation occupies a position on a scale rather than being placed in a box-like category. Besides, like all dimensions of national culture, IDV-COLL does not take into account intra-societal differences. Many nations have enormous cultural diversity. For instance, Brazil and Venezuela still have uncontacted tribes whose members live by hunting-gathering and may not even know that they are Brazilians or Venezuelans. Yet, this does not mean that there is no mainstream Brazilian or Venezuelan national culture that accounts for some cultural similarities shared by most elements (such as regional populations or religious groups) in those nations or any other modern nation (Minkov and Hofstede, 2012, 2014a, b).
Since Hofstede’s (1980) publication, IDV-COLL has received enormous attention in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural management studies. Kagitcibasi (1997) stressed the salience of this topic at international forums and in major publications, whereas Smith et al. (1996) called it “the most important yield of cross-cultural psychology to date” (p. 237).
The IDV-COLL dimension has generated debates and controversies (Oyserman et al. , 2002; Schimmack et al., 2005; Voronov and Singer, 2002) that have not been completely resolved. The goal of this paper is to provide a brief overview of IDV-COLL as a dimension of national culture (rather than as an individual-level dimension), as well as a new valid measure of that dimension based on new data from 52,974 probabilistically selected respondents aggregated to the level of their 56 nations. In this way, we respond to a concern formulated by van Witteloostuijn (2016): there is a strong anti-Popperian trend in social science, which involves a scarcity of replication studies. We agree with that author and believe that a reconceptualization and replication of IDV-COLL as a dimension of national culture has been long overdue.
Background
Hofstede’s (1980) study was the first...