Paper Review: "Are Japanese More Collectivistic Than Americans?" By Takano And Sogon

 

Based on my experiences in Japan and several Western countries, I believe this is not necessarily true. Takano and Sogon [1] conducted a psychological experiment with Japanese college students and compared the results to similar experiments conducted with American students, using similar protocol.

In their study, Takano and Sogon [1] report the Conformity Rate of Japanese students and compare it with the rates reported for American students by Asch [2] and Williams and Sogon [3].

Since these studies [1]-[3] are published in professional journals, they contain various procedures that are accepted by the professional community. As this blog is not a professional journal, I will simplify the contents of [1] in a way that my interpretation, hopefully, does not distort the original papers. The book [4] by Takano is easier to decipher.

Experiment by Takano and Sogon [1]

Fig. Material

 

 

The following is the mean value of the Takano-Sogon scheme and is compared with that of other experiments on American students with similar protocol.

Fig. Mean Conformity Rates of the three experiments

As shown in the above figure, the Mean Conformity Rate of the Takano-Sogon experiment was 22.5%, which was much lower than the 36.8% obtained by Asch [2], who reported experimental results on American students using a similar protocol. It was roughly comparable to the mean conformity rate of 25% found by Williams and Sogon [3], whose subjects were also Japanese students.

This finding contradicts the common view that Japanese people are more collectivistic and Westerners are more individualistic, at least within the context of these experiments. While culture is intricate and complex, making these experimental results not overly generalizable, it is interesting to see how people can be preconditioned.

Takano and Sogon [1] argue that the belief in Japanese collectivism can be traced back to Percival Lowell (1855–1916) [5], an American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer. Lowell, in addition to his view of Japanese people as collectivistic and Westerners as individualistic, also fueled speculation about canals on Mars [5]. Takano and Sogon [1] and Takano [4] further contend that Ruth Benedict emphasized the idea of Japanese collectivism in her influential book [6] after WWII.

Writing my blog gave me an opportunity to reconsider my thoughts on collectivism theory. In my blog I discussed several notable Japanese individuals, including Sugihara Chiune [7], Asakawa Kan’ichi [8], and Fujii Sei [9], among others. Those people were far from being collectivistic.

[1] Takano, K., and Sogon, S., “Are Japanese more collectivistic than Americans? Examining conformity in in-groups and the reference-group effect”,  Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 39(3), 237–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022107313902, 2008

[2] Asch, S. E. , “Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority”. Psychological Monographs, 70 (9, Whole No. 416, 1956).

[3] Williams, T. P., & Sogon, S. “Group composition and conforming behavior in Japanese students.”, Japanese Psychological Research, 26, 231-234, 1984.

[4] Takano, Y., “Nihonjin Ron no Kiken na Ayamachi”, Discover Keisho, 2019

[5] Lowell, P., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell

[6] Benedict, R. “Kiku to Katana”, (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture), translated by M. Hasegawa, Kodansha, 2005

[7] Sugihara Chiune, https://japanlatebloomer.blogspot.com/2023/10/sugihara-chiune-courage-did-not-suffice.html

[8] Asakawa Kan’ichi, https://japanlatebloomer.blogspot.com/2024/02/asakawa-kanichi-from-samurai-to-yale.html

[9] Fujii Sei,

https://japanlatebloomer.blogspot.com/2024/06/test-1.html

 

Acknowledgement:  I thank K. Takano for providing me with [1].