Beyond Collectivism: New Scale Reveals Duty and Obligation at the Heart of East Asian Social Life

For more than three decades, the dominant framework for understanding cultural differences in social life has been the contrast between individualism and collectivism. According to this framework, East Asian societies tend to be more collectivistic, emphasizing group harmony and interdependence, whereas Western societies tend to be more individualistic, emphasizing personal autonomy and self-expression. The framework has generated thousands of studies and has become a fixture of introductory psychology textbooks. Yet a growing body of work suggests that the standard tools used to measure collectivism may be capturing something quite different from what the theory originally described. A recent study by Talhelm and colleagues, published in Nature Human Behaviour and accompanied by a commentary from Adam B. Cohen and Amiryah N. Toves of Arizona State University, takes aim at this measurement problem and proposes a new construct, responsibilism, to fill the gap.

The core of the argument is deceptively simple. Previous research has widely associated East Asian cultures with higher levels of collectivism, but the self-report scales most often used to measure that collectivism tend to emphasize warmth, friendliness, and prosociality toward all people, including strangers and acquaintances. Items on such scales ask respondents whether they enjoy helping others, whether they value harmony in general, or whether they feel connected to humanity at large. When East Asian respondents score highly on these instruments, researchers have traditionally interpreted the result as evidence of collectivism. But Cohen and Toves point out that this interpretation may conflate two very different things: generalized warmth toward everyone, and the specific, binding sense of duty that people feel toward particular others in their close relationships.

This distinction matters because classical theorizing about collectivism did not primarily concern warmth toward strangers. In their landmark 1991 paper, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama argued that East Asian selves are fundamentally interdependent: the self is construed through relationships, roles, and obligations to specific people such as parents, siblings, and in-laws. The emphasis was on embeddedness in a web of particular relationships, not on indiscriminate niceness. If the scales used to measure collectivism instead tap generalized prosociality, they may be measuring a construct that is only loosely related to the original theory, and cross-cultural comparisons built on those scales may be misleading.

Methodologists in cultural psychology have long warned about the pitfalls of cross-cultural self-report. One well-known problem is the reference-group effect, described by Steven Heine and colleagues in 2002: respondents from different cultures implicitly compare themselves to different standards. A person in a society where everyone is highly dutiful may rate themselves as only moderately dutiful, while a person in a society where duty is less salient may rate themselves highly by comparison. Self-report scales, in other words, do not provide a common yardstick across cultures. Cohen and Toves note that such measurement challenges have shadowed the collectivism literature from its beginnings, and that the field has often papered over them with broad interpretive claims.

Talhelm and colleagues responded to these challenges by developing a responsibilism scale designed to capture duties and responsibilities in close relationships. Rather than asking about warmth toward people in general, the scale probes the concrete obligations that bind people to family members and other close others: the sense that one must care for aging parents, fulfill one’s role in the family, and meet the expectations of those one is bound to. This focus on obligation rather than affection represents a deliberate theoretical reorientation. It shifts the locus of East Asian sociality from sentiment to duty, from feeling warm toward everyone to being bound to specific people whether or not warmth is present in the moment.

The theoretical stakes of this reorientation are considerable. If responsibilism turns out to be a better description of East Asian cultural psychology than generalized collectivism, then a great deal of received wisdom may need revision. For example, findings that East Asians are more helpful or more prosocial than Westerners have often been interpreted as evidence of collectivist warmth. But if the underlying mechanism is obligation to close others rather than generalized warmth, then East Asians might not be more helpful to strangers at all; they might be more reliably helpful to the specific people to whom they owe duties. The two patterns look identical on a warmth-oriented scale but diverge sharply in real behavior toward strangers versus kin.

Cohen and Toves bring their own research history to this discussion. In earlier work, Adam B. Cohen and Paul Rozin examined moral beliefs across cultures and religious traditions and found that what looks like a difference in the strength of moral conviction often reflects a difference in the domain in which morality is applied. Some cultures treat obligations to family and community as moral requirements, while others treat them as personal choices or matters of preference. This line of work suggests that the content of morality, not merely its intensity, varies across cultures, and it dovetails with the responsibilism framework: a culture high in responsibilism treats duties to close others as non-negotiable moral facts, not as optional kindnesses.

The responsibilism approach also resonates with research on religion and culture. Cohen and colleagues have previously shown that religious traditions differ systematically in how they construe obligation, with some emphasizing duty to God and community as central to the self. Insofar as religious practice trains people to experience their roles as binding, it may be one of the cultural institutions that sustains responsibilism across generations. Family structure is another candidate: extended-family households, filial piety norms, and ancestor veneration all institutionalize obligations to specific others, and their prevalence varies dramatically across societies. Talhelm’s own prior work on rice farming versus wheat farming in China argued that agricultural traditions requiring intensive cooperation, such as rice paddy cultivation, foster interdependent norms, and responsibilism may be one of the psychological signatures of such subsistence styles.

What makes the new work potentially transformative for the field is its methodological candor. Rather than defending the traditional collectivism scales, Talhelm and colleagues built an instrument targeted at the construct they believe the theory actually describes. Cohen and Toves, in their commentary, frame this as a welcome correction to a literature that has often measured warmth and called it collectivism. The move parallels other recent reforms in psychology, in which researchers have re-examined whether popular scales actually measure the constructs they were designed for. In cultural psychology, where the stakes include how entire societies understand themselves and each other, such re-examination carries particular weight.

The implications extend beyond academia. Cross-cultural misunderstandings in workplaces, international relations, and clinical settings often rest on popular versions of the collectivism idea: the assumption that people from East Asian backgrounds are simply more group-oriented or more agreeable. If the deeper reality is a strong sense of particularized obligation, then practical guidance changes. A manager or clinician working with someone high in responsibilism should understand that the person’s commitments to specific family members are not soft preferences that can be traded off against personal goals, but binding duties that structure their decisions. Conversely, the framework predicts that such a person may feel less obligation toward strangers and institutions, a nuance that blanket assumptions about collectivist warmth obscure. As Cohen and Toves suggest, taking duties seriously as a distinct psychological dimension, separable from warmth and from generalized prosociality, may ultimately give cultural psychology a sharper and more honest picture of how selves are built in different societies.

Subject of Research: Cultural psychology of collectivism and the measurement of duties and responsibilities in close relationships

Article Title: Responsibilism and culture

Article References: Responsibilism and culture. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02616-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02616-z

Keywords: cultural psychology, collectivism, responsibilism, East Asia, social psychology, cross-cultural measurement, close relationships, duty and obligation, self-report scales, independent and interdependent selves, reference-group effect, Nature Human Behaviour