Cultural Accommodation: Hybridity and the Framing of Social Obligation

Implications of cultural accommodation-hybridization were explored within the framework of individualism-collectivism. Individualism highlights the personal and centralizes individuals as the unit of analyses, whereas collectivism highlights the social and contextualizes individuals as parts of connected social units. In 2 experiments, the ways in which individualism, collectivism, and identity salience influence social obligation to diverse others was explored. The authors varied the personal goal interrupted (achievement-pleasure), the target (individual-group), and focus (in-group-larger society) of social obligation within subjects. The authors hypothesized that collectivism would increase obligation to the in-group when identity was made salient; that individualism alone would dampen social obligation; and that cultural accommodation-hybridization (being high in both individualism and collectivism) would increase obligation to larger society.