The many dimensions of culture

I first met Geert Hofstede in 1973, at the Congress of the International Association of Applied Psychology in Liege, Belgium. He mentioned to a group of delegates at the Congress that he had a large data set that he was going to analyze and offered to take us to Brussels to look at it. We were quite impressed. A few years later, Sage Publications asked me to review the manuscript that became the 1980 book. I recommended publication most enthusiastically. I found the individualism-collectivism dimension particularly helpful, because it organized many of the observations of research I had done in the 1960s in traditional Greece and in Illinois.1 For instance, I observed that Greeks behaved much more differently when they interacted with an ingroup (e.g., the family) than with an outgroup (e.g., strangers) than did the samples from Illinois. The Greeks behaved much more under the influence of norms (what should I do?) than of attitudes (what would I like to do?) than was true for Americans. They defined who they were in more social terms. Many social behaviors were associated with intimacy in Greece to a greater extent than was the case in Illinois. For example, upon meeting a “new friend,” the Greeks might ask: “How much do you earn per month?” which was not a likely question in Illinois. At the time I reviewed the Hofstede book, I was also studying Hispanics in the USA. Many of the findings could be understood much better if the individualism-collectivism dimension was taken into account. For example, we found when we presented several hundred situations to our samples of Hispanics and non-Hispanics and asked them to rate the probability of different behaviors in those situations that the answers fell into a particular pattern. When the behavior was positive, the Hispanic average rating of the probability was higher than the rating of the non-Hispanics, but when the behavior was negative, the Hispanic average rating of the probability was lower than the rating of the non-Hispanics. We called this the simpatia script,2 because it is characteristic of people who want to have good relationships with others, i.e., want others to see them as “simpatico.” The other dimensions of Hofstede’s 1980 book— Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Masculinity-Femininity—are also interesting. In what follows I will first make some general comments about Hofstede’s work, then will discuss the individualism-collectivism dimension and stress its importance in the recent literature in psychology and organizational studies, and finally I will touch on the other dimensions.