Allocentrism and Idiocentrism as Predictors of In-Group Perceptions: An Individual Difference Extension of Cultural Patterns

Abstract Cross-cultural research has shown that collectivists have more representations of others in their concepts of self and other persons than do individualists. Our research extends such research by investigating whether cultural variables of collectivism and individualism at the cultural level—conceptualized as allocentrism and idiocentrism at the individual level—could predict social referencing in cognitive representations beyond that of the cultural-level variables. We replicated the cross-cultural finding that collectivists generate more social references than do individualists. We also found that allocentrism was predictive of the number of social references generated by both European Americans and Mexican Americans. Thus, individual-level explanations in conjunction with cultural-level explanations may be required to better understand cognitive representations of social entities.