Short CommunicationThe relationship among individual differences in individualism-collectivism, extraversion, and self-presentation
Introduction
Chiu, Leung, and Hong (2011) define culture as a network of procedural and declarative knowledge, which answers the fundamental questions in life. Culture is distributed in the society through media messages, language, practices, artifacts, values, and modeling of a behavior (Markus & Kitayama, 2001). On the other hand, personality is “the patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, together with the psychological mechanism -hidden or not- behind those patterns” (Funder, 1997, p. 1). Personality is shaped by genetic dispositions and environmental factors, the most important of which are cultural values. Markus and Kitayama (1998) explain that there is no personality without culture.
McCrae and Terracciano (2005) investigated the relationships between the Big Five personality traits and culture and found that individualistic countries (i.e. North Americans and Europeans) scored higher in extraversion than collectivistic countries (i.e. Africans and Asians). Hutchinson and Gul (1997) examined the impact of extraversion and individualism versus collectivism on students' group learning preferences and found that extraverts with a collectivistic orientation prefer more group learning environments than those with an individualistic orientation. Findings such as these suggest that culture has a significant impact on personality and behavior. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate individual differences in and the relationships among individualism versus collectivism, extraversion and self-presentation attitudes, intentions, and behaviors on social networking sites (SNS).
Section snippets
Individualism versus collectivism
Individualism is “the degree to which a person acts as an individual rather than as a member of a group” (Hofstede, 1994, p. 6). Individualists are more autonomous, independent, self-contained, success-oriented, and calculative (e.g., Chan and Cheung, 2016, Rinne et al., 2013). They place greater value in privacy and personal opinions (Hofstede, 2001). On the other hand, collectivism is “the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups” (Hofstede, 1984, p. 83). Collectivists value
Participants
Through convenience sampling method, 311 students from a state university in Turkey were recruited and willingly participated in the study. An online survey was administered using an Internet-based surveying system in a counterbalanced order. Of the sample, 236 were women (75.9%) and 75 were men (24.1%). Participants' ages ranged from 18 years old to 37 years old (M = 20.68; SD = 3.07). In terms of college status, there were 157 freshmen (50.5%), 83 sophomores (26.7%), 38 juniors (12.2%), and 33
Hypothesis testing results
The results show that individualism has a significant correlation with attitudes toward selfie posting, whereas it has a non-significant correlation with intentions and actual behaviors; therefore, Hypothesis 1 was rejected except for attitudes toward selfie posting. However, collectivism has no significant correlation with selfie posting attitudes, intentions, or behaviors; therefore, Hypothesis 2 was supported. Results also indicate that individualism has a significant correlation with
Discussion and conclusion
The present study focused on gender differences and the relationships among culture, personality, and selfie posting on SNS. Findings suggest that selfie posting is a reflection of personality (i.e., extraversion) but not much of a cultural orientation. Thus, one of the main contributions of the present study is that even though culture (individualism and collectivism) and extraversion are related, culture does not have a strong relationship with selfie posting.
Results suggest that
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