Culture, essentialism, and agency: Are individuals universally believed to be more real entities than groups?

By Yoshihisa Kashima, E. Kashima, Chi-Yue Chiu, Tomas Farsides, Michele J. Gelfand, Ying-yi Hong, U. Kim, F. Strack, L. Werth, Masaki Yuki and 1 more. 2005

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Are human individuals universally seen to be more real entities (or more entitative, to use Campbell's, 1958, term) than social groups? Although the individual may be seen to be more entitative than social groups in the West, it is unclear whether this is the case in other cultures, especially in East Asia. Two aspects of perceived entitativity are distinguished: psychological essentialism (belief in the presence of essence-like unchangeable properties) and agency (perception that a social entity is an agent), and examined for four social targets (individual, family, friendship group, and society) in three English-speaking cultures (Australia, UK, and USA), three East Asian cultures (Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea), and two continental European cultures (Belgium and Germany). In all cultures, the individual person was seen to possess essence-like unchangeable characteristics more than social groups (i.e. essentialized). As for agency, the individual person was seen to be more agentic than groups in Western cultures, but both individuals and groups were conferred an equal level of agency in East Asia. Individuals may be universally more essentialized than friendship groups and societies, but not always seen to be more agentic, than social groups. Implications of the results for conceptions of individualism and collectivism are discussed.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6a296c5bb008a3bad0be8396900e5796a5f75ae

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding the Relationship Between Perceived Authenticity and Well-Being (2019, background): “Although this suggests that authenticity is valued across many cultures, there is also evidence that authenticity is conceptualized differently in different cultures (e.g., Kashima et al., 2004, 2005; Park, Haslam, & Kashima, 2012; Slabu, Lenton, Sedikides, & Bruder, 2014).”
Cross-cultural organizational behavior. (2007, background): “Gelfand et al. (2001) found that Americans perceived conflicts to be more about winning and violations to individual rights, whereas Japanese perceived the same conflicts to be about compromise and violations to duties.”
Psychological Essentialism, Implicit Theories, and Intergroup Relations (2006, background): “However, non-biological essences (e.g. spirits, souls) may also be imputed and research suggests that biological causal beliefs may not underpin essentialist thinking in some cultures (Kashima et al., 2005).”
Attachment avoidance and the cultural fit hypothesis: A cross-cultural investigation (2010, result): “Several other studies have supported the claim that Hong Kong is more collectivist than the United States and most other Western cultures (e.g., Chinese Culture Connection, 1987; Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martı́nez, 2000; Kashima et al., 2005; Triandis, Chen, & Chan, 1998; Wheeler, Reis, & Bond, 1”
Lay Theories and Intergroup Relations (2006, background): “Other recent research, though, has found entitativity to consist of two distinct components: perceived homogeneity and perceived cohesiveness or agency (e.g. Brewer et al., 2004; Ip et al., in press; Kashima et al., 2005), and thus synthesizing definitions of entitativity is still underway.”
Blaming leaders for organizational accidents: Proxy logic in collective- versus individual-agency cultures (2006, background): “In a variant task, Kashima et al. (2005) asked participants to rate the extent to which an individual or a group target could be said to “intend,” “decide,” “wish,” “plan,” and so forth.”
Intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies (2008, background): “When research in this tradition has turned its attention to the topic of groups, it has invariably concluded that people truly do classify some groups as agents (Bloom & Veres 1999; Kashima et al. 2005; Morris et al. 2001; O'Laughlin & Malle 2002).”