Generalisations

Cultural generalisations provide some perspective of how the culture influences how people from that culture tend to behave, interact and communicate in certain situations.

While it might be helpful to know that Chinese tend to be collectivists while Americans tend to be individualistic it's important to keep in mind that cultural generalisations are just generalisations. We need to be aware that not everybody from a culture will "conform" to their cultural generalisation – a Chinese person might be individualistic and an American might be collectivist.  This is because a person’s personality, background and experiences at all times play a role in how that person thinks and acts.

The purpose of cultural generalisations is to make non-judgmental cross cultural comparisons; it is not to distort or negate the complexity of social interaction.