How Does Collectivism Affect Social Interactions? A Test of Two Competing Accounts.

How does the cultural construct of collectivism impact social interactions? Two accounts of collectivism offer diverging predictions. The collectivism-as-values account proposes that people in collectivistic cultures prioritize their ingroup relationships; accordingly, this account predicts that collectivistic cultures will have more harmonious ingroup interactions than individualistic cultures. The socioecological account holds that individualistic cultures have high relational mobility, which requires people to invest in their ingroup relationships, whereas collectivistic cultures feature more fixed relationships that do not require positive engagement.

Ingroup vigilance in collectivistic cultures.

Collectivistic cultures have been characterized as having harmonious, cooperative ingroup relationships. However, we find evidence that people in collectivistic cultures are more vigilant toward ingroup members, mindful of their possible unethical intentions. Study 1 found that Chinese participants were more vigilant than Americans in within-group competitions, anticipating more unethical behaviors from their peers.