Communal orientation and individualism: factors and correlations with values, social adjustment, and self-esteem

Contemporary personality structures in the West reportedly are dominated by a problematic self-contained individualism, whereas a community-oriented ensembled individualism is presumed to be more adaptive. With the present sample of American undergraduates, an Individualism scale (Bales & Couch, 1969) was used to measure self-contained individualism, and the Communal Orientation Scale (Clark, Ouellette, Powell, & Milberg, 1987) was used to measure ensembled individualism. Results showed that both instruments predicted a belief in equalitarianism, but individualism was more likely to be associated with interpersonal maladjustment and poor self-esteem. Neither the full scales nor any of their factors displayed significant inverse correlations with each other, thus confirming the existence of negative correlates for self-contained individualism but also demonstrating that the two individualisms are not wholly incommensurable, as has been argued in the past.