The Research Digest Blog asks, “Are children from collectivist cultures more likely to say it’s okay to lie for the group?”
The theory says that yes, they might say it’s okay to lie for your team than children from individualistic cultures, such as the US, which places more value on self-interest.
The surprising finding was that children from China actually found lying to protect one’s team less acceptable than children in the US did.
“This is not to suggest that Chinese children were acting in an individualistic manner,” the researchers said, “but rather that they were acting based on what they believed to be a more salient moral aspect of the situation.” Source: Research Digest Blog
Collective cooperation may explain why China has a long history of innovation.
After all, the Chinese invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the multistage rocket and much more. Source: The Growing Gap Between the US and China
In addition, I read in the September/October 2012 issue of Foreign Policy Magazine that the Chinese are doing it again. for example: inventing a modular method to build energy-efficient skyscrapers —China plans to use this innovative method to built the world’s tallest building (220-stories) in ninety days compared to the current tallest building in Dubai that is 160 stories tall and took six years to build. Other innovations China is developing is the straddling bus in addition to safer, cleaner nuclear energy.
Continued on December 21, 2012 in Individualism and Collective Cultures – Part 5 or return to Part 3
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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