In this video I discuss how cultural dimensions can be used to think about the general differences between cultures and how culture may influence thought and behavior. I describe Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, based on his research with IBM employees in more than 50 countries around the world. Hofstede investigated 5 cultural dimensions: individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and time orientation. In 2010 he added a sixth dimension of indulgence/restraint. It’s important to remember that these dimensions are for considering overall patterns of thought and there is certainly still individual variation within cultures.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video introducing social psychology, I mentioned that social psychologists are interested in how things like cultural background can influence individual behavior. So how does culture shape how we think, feel, and behave? Well, if we think about this question, one of the first difficulties that we’ll face is, what exactly do we mean by culture? This is a broad term and it’s really hard to say exactly what culture is and therefore it’s hard to say how cultures differ from one another. So one way that we can think about the differences between cultures is to use what are called “cultural dimensions“. So in the late 1960s into the early 1970s Dutch researcher Gert Hofstede collected data from a hundred and seventeen thousand IBM employees in 50 different countries around the world.
Now the reason he selected from these IBM employees is he thought they were similar in many ways; they had similar educational backgrounds, perhaps they had similar talents or similar levels of ambition, and therefore any patterns in the data might be attributable to overall cultural differences in these different countries. So based on this research, Hofstede proposed five main cultural dimensions or ways of thinking about how cultures can differ from one another.
The first of these is individualism versus collectivism and this just refers to how much a culture emphasizes the importance of individual efforts versus how much it emphasizes relationships and group ties. The next cultural dimension is masculinity or femininity and this is the idea that cultures differ in their gender roles and and how much they value competition and material success, which would be considered more masculine, versus how much they value things like cooperation or overall quality of life which would be considered more feminine. The next cultural dimension is what Hofstede called uncertainty avoidance, and this is how much cultures are able to tolerate uncertainty. Do they like to have clear expectations for behavior where there are strict rules of etiquette; that say in this situation you should always act in this particular way? Or are they more tolerant of ambiguity; where there are situations where it’s not clear how you’re supposed to act, where they’re not clearly defined cultural rules for your behavior?
The next cultural dimension is power distance and this refers to the feeling of closeness that people have in the culture to the power structure of the society. Do they feel that power is distant and removed from their daily life? Or do they feel that they are actively involved in the power structure and it’s close to them? And lastly we have the idea of time orientation and he thought that cultures could be considered to have a short-term time orientation which meant they’re more focused on the past and traditions, or they can have a long-term time orientation which is more focused on the future and the willingness of the culture to adapt and respond to new challenges. Now in 2010 Hofstede proposed a sixth cultural dimension which is referred to as indulgence and restraint, and this is related to how much the culture emphasizes the gratification of desires and fun.
Now it’s important to remember that these cultural dimensions are just ways of thinking about how cultures might differ from one another. They’re about overall tendencies, ways of thinking about the world, but they’re not about specific behaviors and they’re certainly not about the specific views of individuals within that culture. So it’s overall patterns; not suggesting that everybody in that culture will think a certain way about something like the power distance or about the importance of individualism or collectivism. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
