Members in the Media
From: NPR

Could A More Individualistic World Also Be A More Altruistic One?

Individualism is that rugged frontier quality that reflects a mix of independence, valuing free expression, and eschewing close family ties relative to more distant relationships.

And it is on the rise. Not just in the United States — which has long been ranked as one of the world’s most individualist countries — but nearly everywhere.

In a 2017 study examining five decades worth of data across 78 countries — from Norway to Nigeria, and Canada to Colombia — psychologists Henri Santos, Michael Varnum, and Igor Grossmann found that people increasingly report that they value friends more relative to family, want their children to be independent, and value free expression. All of these values are closely associated with individualism.

As the researchers reported in the journal Psychological Science, individualism has increased by roughly 12 percent worldwide since 1960. This increase appears to be due mostly to increasing socio-economic development, including higher incomes, more education, urbanization, and a shift toward white-collar jobs. Increases in these factors in a given region are reliably followed by gains in individualist beliefs and practices in the ensuing decade. Those few countries that bucked the global trend toward individualism included some with the lowest socio-economic development, including Armenia, Malaysia, Mali, and Uruguay.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): NPR

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Comments

Total hokum. Psychological science doesn’t live in the real world. America is a nation of sheep herded lock step by the power elite of her corpocracy, the unequal Devil’s marriage between the more powerful power elite of big corporations and government’s less powerful power elite.

There is nothing individualistic about America’s herd. It has been conditioned by the power elite to think and behave uniformly when it comes to foreign and domestic policy and actions. That is why America is always at war and negligent at home.

Unless they have been compromised by the corpocracy, psychological “scientists,” at least when they get to my age ought to know better.

I’m confused as to how this is related to altruism.


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