Despite recent growth in research on collectivism, there are no truly global measures of collectivism.
•Our measure (the GCI) updates past measures and covers 99.9% of earth's population.
•Our measure eliminates the strong WEIRD biases of past research.
•Our measure is mostly behavioral and relies on representative national sampling.
Our measure compares favorably with existing measures.
•Our measure is associated with important outcomes (e.g., suicide rates, human rights).
•This association is statistically independent of both national wealth (GDP) and modernity.
•Our measure uncovers two important drivers of cultural evolution: farming and pathogen load.
Abstract
This report introduces the Global Collectivism Index (GCI) – a measure covering 99.9% of the earth's population. The GCI includes six sub-scores (e.g., household living arrangements, ingroup favoritism). Collectivism is very high in Sub-Saharan Africa, very low in Western Europe, and intermediate in most other regions. Even after controlling for both national wealth and technological sophistication, national collectivism scores predict variables such as suicide rates, alcohol consumption, agricultural employment, and valuing child obedience. Further, this was true after directly pitting the GCI against several competing predictors of the major cultural outcomes examined in this report. Some competing predictors were national wealth (GDP), modernization, and a popular seven-factor conceptualization of interdependence. The GCI is a much-needed, well-validated, historically updated measure that eliminates previous WEIRD biases and offers greatly increased statistical power in cross-cultural research.