Comparing Japan and the United States on individualism/collectivism: A follow‐up review

Abstract

It has been long believed that the Japanese are typical collectivists whereas Americans are typical individualists. To examine the validity of this common view, we formerly reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared Japanese and Americans regarding individualism/collectivism (I/C), and found that the overwhelming majority of those studies had not supported the common view (Takano & Osaka, ). In this follow‐up, we reviewed 20 additional empirical studies (7 behavioral studies, 13 questionnaire studies), most of which had been published after the former review. When combined with the formerly reviewed 15 studies, 19 studies reported no clear difference, and 11 studies reported that Japanese were more individualistic than Americans. These 30 studies are inconsistent with the common view. Only 5 studies supported the common view, even when we included 3 studies whose validity was questionable. After it was formerly found that the common view was not supported empirically, a variety of alternative accounts were presented regarding the reason for this finding. We examined three major accounts in light of the reviewed studies and found that none of them was congruent with the empirical data. Thus, it seems to be reasonable to conclude that the common view is not valid.

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