Strong and weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures

In a recent paper by Sasaguwa, Toyada, and Sakano (2006), they are grouping Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Spain, and the United States as individualistic countries, and China, Columbia, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Singapore, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, The Netherlands, South Africa, [and] Switzerland as collectivistic.

The three Japanese authors of this paper must have regretted their allegiance to this rigid dichotomy “ individualistic versus collectivistic ”, because their results show that “students returning from so-called collectivistic countries were more individualistic than returnees from so-called individualistic countries”. Moreover, these 141 Japanese students had sojourned in 39 different countries, which as a sample per country means only 3.6 participants! One more example of this traditional approach to the study of culture and intercultural understanding can be found in a study by Merkin (2006) that reports data tending to confirm the following in Hofstede’s hypotheses:

[Hofstede 1]: Members of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures are more likely to communicate ritualistically than members of weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures,

[Hofstede 2]: Members of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures are less likely to use harmonious facework strategies than members of weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures,

[Hofstede 3]: Members of strong uncertainty-avoidance cultures will be more likely to respond to face threatening acts with aggression than members of weak uncertainty-avoidance cultures.

These confirmations are based on the following data: 658 college students (442 women and 216 men) representing the following six countries: Japan, Sweden, Israel, Hong Kong, Chile and the United States. The samples from each country were not equal, the United States having the largest number—241 students, and Hong Kong only 32.

From this data, one can have serious doubts about the scientific value of these confirmations of the Hofstede hypotheses which read “Members of strong Uncertainty-Avoidance cultures …”, when in this paper “members” is restricted to college students who in 5 of the 6 countries represent a very small number of participants.

As mentioned before, any social psychological research attempting to generalize from a college sample to a nation has no scientific basis. Several other examples could be given. It is quite clear, however, that intercultural research based on the traditional cultural dimensions is certainly not the key for intercultural understanding. From now on, research dealing with cultures can no longer be satisfied with the approach which consists only in trying to apply to all cultures so-called universal “cultural dimensions” or fixed sets of polar attributes.