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A Psychological Inquiry into the Confucian Origins of East Asian Collectivism
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- Authors
- Issue Date
- 2011
- Citation
- Korean Social Sciences Review(KSSR), Vol.1 No.1, pp. 37-103
- Keywords
- Individualism-Collectivism ; View of Human Being ; Individual-centered ; Self Construal ; Independent vs. Interdependent ; Liberalism Confucianism
- Description
- Translated from the published article in Korean Journal of Social and Personality
Psychology 21(4): 21-53, 2007 with permission from the Korean Psychological
Association.
- Abstract
- Compared with individualistic culture of Western countries (e.g. America, Canada,
Australia, Britain, France, Germany, and Netherlands etc.), East Asian countries (e.g.
Korean, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore etc.) have the collectivistic
culture. People in these two cultures have different psychological and behavioral tendencies.
In individualistic culture, they place high values on the independence and autonomy,
frank expression of private feelings and needs, and stable consistency between personal
dispositions and behaviors. On the other hand, in collectivistic culture they strive to achieve
interdependence and harmony with others, to control the private feelings and needs, and
to change themselves in accordance with their situations and relations with others. On the
background of these differences, there lie different views of human being in general and selfconstrual.
That is, those living in the individualistic culture have individual-centered view of
human being and independent (and separate) self-construal; in contrast with this, those in
collectivistic culture have relation-centered view of human being and interdependent (and
holistic) self-construal. In this paper, the author tried to explicate the origins of these cultural
differences in the traditional system of thought in the Western and East Asian societies, and
their theories of ideal person derived from these systems. From these review, it was found
that the origin of Western individualism lies in the ideocentric liberalism, and that of East
Asian collectivism lies in the strong tradition of Confucianism.
- ISSN
- 2234-4039
- Language
- English
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