Responsibilism Scale

For thirty years, surveys of individualism and collectivism kept failing to find the East–West difference everyone expected; Japanese samples regularly scored less collectivistic than Americans. Talhelm and 107 colleagues (Nature Human Behaviour, 2026) argue the old scales were contaminated with “warm fuzzy” items about liking people and cooperating, which Westerners endorse most. Their alternative, responsibilism, is collectivism as duties, roles and obligations in close relationships, paired with wariness toward strangers. Measured that way, the differences are enormous: Denmark scores 0 on the culture scale and Kuwait 100, with the United States at 38 and China at 91.

This is the authors' 14-item scale (16 questions, as two items are agree/disagree pairs on one scenario), scored exactly as in their published syntax, including the correction for acquiescence. The norms are the authors' own data: 12,247 people, mostly university students, from 100 cultures covering 90% of the world's population. Cultures are weighted equally in the percentiles, so “world” means the average culture, not the average person. Your score is placed on the 0–100 culture scale, so you can see which countries' averages you resemble.

One caveat: the scale was built to separate cultures, not people. Its items deliberately span different relationships and settings, and the individual-level reliability is low (α ≈ 0.5 in the norm sample), so a single person's score is a rough estimate. The five facets rest on two or three items each and are rougher still.