Social Lunch ~ Thomas Talhelm, PhD, University of Chicago
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Thomas Talhelm, Professor, University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Topic: Collectivism Isn’t What Most People Think It Is: A Study of 100 Cultures When I started as a research assistant 20 years ago, senior professors let me in on an open secret: self-report scales of collectivism "don't work." They meant findings like how the US regularly scores more collectivistic than Japan (Oyserman et al., 2002) and a meta-analysis of 76 studies that concluded that the chance of finding East-West differences was no different from flipping a coin (Heine, 2002). It was a problem! The field responded. Explanations were proposed. Most researchers blamed self-report methodology. I think we had the wrong image of collectivism. I’ll share data testing this idea with 16,237 people from 100 cultures around the world. And I'll suggest why this basic idea pervades beyond culture, from social class to politics, maybe even basic person perception.