#individualism — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: August 25, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Individualism and income appear to shape relationship status across 59 countries

URL: https://www.psypost.org/personal-demographics-and-cultural-values-jointly-predict-singlehood/

Whether a person remains single is linked to a combination of personal circumstances and the cultural values of the country they live in. A large study published in PLOS One found that personal traits like age and income relate to relationship status differently depending on how much a society values individualism and adaptability. These findings suggest that singlehood is shaped by broad cultural environments rather than just individual choices.

Over the past few decades, the traditional family structure has shifted in many parts of the world. In the United States, Canada, and various European and Asian nations, the population of single adults has grown steadily. Researchers want to understand the broad societal forces driving this trend. Past sociological research has mostly focused on personal characteristics, such as education levels or economic stability.

Psychologists Marta Kowal and Katarzyna Adamczyk, based at the University of Wrocław and Adam Mickiewicz University respectively, wanted to expand on this past research. They suspected that personal demographic characteristics might operate differently depending on the surrounding culture. The researchers decided to examine how national culture interacts with personal circumstances to predict relationship status.

To measure culture, the researchers relied on a framework known as the Minkov-Hofstede model. This model divides national cultures into two main spectrums. The first spectrum is individualism versus collectivism. Individualistic cultures value personal freedom, independence, and self-reliance. Collectivistic cultures prioritize tradition, strict social rules, and group loyalty.

The second cultural spectrum is flexibility versus monumentalism. Flexible cultures, often found in East Asia, value adaptability, humility, self-control, and long-term goals like acquiring a good education. Monumentalist cultures, which the model associates with regions like Latin America and the Arab world, value an unchanging and proud sense of self. Monumentalist societies encourage people to follow their impulses, seek immediate gratification, and remain invariant in their values.

To conduct the study, Kowal and Adamczyk analyzed an existing dataset from the World Values Survey. The researchers utilized a large sample of 71,169 individuals across 59 countries. The data, collected between 2017 and 2021, included detailed interviews conducted at the participants’ homes.

The researchers categorized participants based on their relationship status. People who were married or living together as married were classified as partnered. Those who were single and never married were classified as single. For the main analysis, the researchers excluded people who were divorced, widowed, or separated.

The researchers then gathered personal details for each participant, including their age, sex, hometown size, education level, income, and employment status. Next, they assigned each participant a cultural score based on their country of residence. They used established national scores for both the individualism and flexibility spectrums.

Finally, the researchers used a statistical technique that allowed them to look at data on multiple levels at once. This method let them evaluate how national cultural trends might alter the effects of personal demographics on a person’s relationship status. A secondary analysis that included divorced and widowed individuals as single yielded the exact same statistical patterns.

The analysis revealed several consistent patterns across all countries. People were more likely to be single if they were younger, male, and living in larger towns. Higher education levels, lower income, and unemployment were also associated with a greater likelihood of being single.

These demographic associations align with expectations from past sociological research. Younger people are still in the phase of searching for a partner. Educational expansion delays entry into the workforce, which often pushes back the timeline for marriage. A lack of economic stability, characterized by unemployment or low income, can discourage people from committing to serious relationships.

The sex and location differences also matched established patterns. Women often face more social pressure to marry, which may make them less likely to remain single compared to men. Living in larger urban areas often correlates with a lower adherence to traditional family values, creating environments where singlehood is more socially accepted.

National culture also played a direct role in predicting relationship status. People living in highly individualistic countries were more likely to be single. Individualism grants people the freedom to behave according to their own beliefs, making a single lifestyle an easier path to choose.

People in less flexible, or more monumentalist, countries were also more likely to be single. Because monumentalist cultures encourage people to follow their immediate impulses and desires rather than prioritizing long-term goals, they may promote short-term dating over settling down into a long-term partnership.

The study uncovered notable interactions between personal traits and cultural values. In more individualistic countries, the link between being single and having a lower income or being unemployed was much stronger. Individualistic societies expect young people to become self-reliant and secure their own financial resources before starting a family. If a person lacks those resources in an individualistic culture, they are highly likely to remain single.

The connection between being male and being single was also stronger in individualistic nations. The researchers proposed that individualistic cultures emphasize independence. This cultural emphasis aligns with the traditional social expectation that men should be self-reliant, potentially making singlehood an expected path for men in those societies.

In monumentalist countries, older age was more strongly associated with singlehood than it was in flexible countries. Monumentalist cultures encourage people to live authentically according to their personal desires rather than conforming to societal expectations. Since older adults tend to conform less to social pressures as they age, they may be more inclined to live independently in societies that celebrate personal authenticity.

The researchers noted a few limitations to their work. The data used in the analysis was observational, meaning it cannot prove cause and effect. While lower income and unemployment predict a higher likelihood of singlehood, it is also possible that living alone leads to different financial outcomes. The relationship between these factors could go in both directions.

The analysis also grouped all single and never-married people into one unified category. Single individuals are a highly diverse group with different dating histories and personal desires. Some people actively choose to remain single, while others are involuntarily single.

Future research could expand on these findings by tracking people over time to observe how their relationship status evolves. Researchers could also look at other cultural dimensions to see how the freedom to choose new social groups affects the likelihood of finding a partner.

The study, “Sociodemographic and cultural factors are related to singlehood rates: A multilevel analysis across 59 countries from the World Values Survey,” was authored by Marta Kowal and Katarzyna Adamczyk.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/personal-demographics-and-cultural-values-jointly-predict-singlehood/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Singlehood #RelationshipStatus #Individualism #CulturalFactors #WorldValuesSurvey #Sociology #Demographics #Urbanization #MonumentalistCulture #FlexibilityVsMonumentalism

A masculinity crisis

* American Crusade w/ Eleanor Janega
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chvlbx9zAHg

* Manosphere: A community centred on male grievance and empowerment.
https://theconversation.com/youd-better-start-paying-attention-to-the-manosphere-youre-living-in-it-279547

* Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality
https://confrontingpoverty.org/research/rugged-individualism-and-the-misunderstanding-of-american-inequality/
#MasculinityCrisis #manosphere #masculinity #individualism #competition #SocialDarwinism #RuggedIndividualism #ressentiment #entitlement #equality #inequality #CultureOfMisogyny #misogyny #ChristianRight #violence #war #zeitgeist

Illumination in dark times
A genealogy of modern Western selfhood and a post-Western world

"Smith ... outlines a genealogy of modern Western selfhood: a radically individual, hypermasculine character that was formed during the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering, and altogether assertive,” it was “dedicated to action,” hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing, Smith writes, an “undeveloped heart,” a term borrowed from E. M. Forster’s assessment of the British elite." "

" “We must alter our very relations with the world around us.” This means giving up the exalted and exaggerated idea of the West that boosts a masculinist self-image but severely constricts thought and feeling. “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties,...the not-knowing of how the post-Western story will come out.” Smith’s final warning—that “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer”—should resonate today, as nineteenth-century individualism reasserts itself in the degraded Nietzscheanism of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller." >>

* Mishra, P. (2026, April). "The Authority of Thought". Harper's Magazine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/the-authority-of-thought-pankaj-mishra/

* Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Patrick Smith. 2010 >>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/169395/somebody-elses-century-by-patrick-smith/
#TheWest #WhiteSupremacy #masculinity #ImpulseControl #EthnoNationalism #WesternCivilization #AngloAmerican #parochialism #individualism #subjectivity #SettlerSociety #Culture #RacialInequality #war #EastWest #PostWesternWorld #DarkTimes #illumination #narrative #environment

Image: Double Bay War Memorial, Steyne Park, Sydney

#AynRand’s original introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness is now online--and it directly contradicts most of the claims people make about her #ethics.

If your picture of Rand comes from social media threads, YouTube rants, or second-hand “hot takes,” this is the text that breaks the spell.

Let’s clear out the biggest straw men right away:

• ❌ “Rand said selfishness means hurting people.”


  No. She argues that rational self‑interest forbids coercion, exploitation, and parasitism. Predators aren’t “selfish”—they’re short‑range, self‑destructive, and irrational.

• ❌ “It’s just an excuse to do whatever you want.”


  She draws a hard boundary between whim and #reason. Her ethics demands long‑range thinking, integrity, and principled action — the opposite of impulse.

• ❌ “#Objectivism celebrates cruelty.”


  The introduction explicitly rejects cruelty as irrational. Benevolence is not only compatible with #egoism—it’s a natural expression of a rational, confident person.

• ❌ “Rand denies moral principles.”


  She denies sacrifice as a moral ideal. She does not deny #morality. She argues for a code rooted in reality, reason, and the requirements of human life.

If you want to understand the argument instead of the mythology, read the primary source--it’s short, sharp, and surprisingly accessible.

Read more for context on the full book, editions, and themes.

#philosophy #individualism #reading #nonfiction #ideas #bookstodon

“No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”*…

Individualism has been been a growing force in cultures around the world since the Enlightenment; it picked up momentum in the 20th century (c.f., e.g., Adam Curtis’ masterful Century of Self [and here]); and has become a– if not the— foundational concept in liberalism. But, Nils Gilman argues, the biological discovery of the holobiont gives the lie to “the autonomous individual” in a way that has massive implications not only for how we think about, but also how we govern ourselves…

We like to believe we end at our skin. This is the primary hallucination of modern political philosophy in the West, the foundational axiom upon which we have erected our laws, our economics, and our sense of self-worth. Philosophical liberalism imagines human individuals as discrete, bounded entities — monads moving through space, contained entirely within a fleshy envelope that separates “self” from “other.” This architectural model of the human being underpins the political concept of the autonomous liberal subject, just as it grounds the social scientific commitment to methodological individualism. It asserts that the basic unit of human reality is the singular actor, the “I” that thinks, chooses, and owns.

However, this model is a biological fiction. It is a map that corresponds to no territory found in nature. Over the last three decades the life sciences have undergone a quiet revolution that renders the classical liberal view of the subject not merely philosophical debatable, yet factually incorrect. The concept of the holobiont, coined by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943 but popularized in the anglophone world by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, has shattered the idea of the unitary organism. We now know that every macro-organism is actually a dynamic ecosystem, a chimera composed of a host and billions of symbiotic microbes that function as a distinct, integrated biological unit. You are not a single entity. You are a walking coral reef, a plural assemblage of human and non-human cells negotiating a fragile, continuous existence. Roughly half the cells in your body are not human; they are bacterial, fungal, and viral. They do not merely hitch a ride. They digest your food, regulate your immune system, modulate your mood, and structure the development of your brain.

The implications of this biological reality for political theory are cataclysmic. The entire edifice of Liberalism, from Hobbes and Locke to modern libertarianism, rests on the assumption of the “atomic individual” — a sovereign state of one. This core concept of liberal political theory posits a world of separate, self-governing agents who enter into contracts and demand rights to protect their private sphere from intrusion. The liberal subject claims (and demands) to be walled off, protected, and kept clean of the influence of others.

Biology exposes this desire for total autonomy as not just false, but a death wish. In the logic of the holobiont, absolute immunity is not health; it is starvation. A body hermetically sealed against the “other” dies. Our physical existence requires constant contamination and collaboration with foreign agents. We cannot be “self-made” because we are constitutively “made-with.” Donna Haraway describes this shift as moving from autopoiesis (self-making) to sympoiesis (making-with). We do not precede our relationships; our relationships constitute us. If the political subject is physically constituted by “others,” the concept of self-sovereignty collapses. One cannot be the sole monarch of a kingdom occupied by foreign powers that provide the essential infrastructure for the kingdom’s survival…

[Gilman elaborates on the implications both for our political and management systems and for the social sciences that study them. And he explores why this new perspective is hard to internalize and embrace…]

The resistance to this holobiontic perspective is fierce because it is terrifying. As Rudyard Kipling observed (in a quote often misattributed to Nietzsche), “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” The autonomous liberal subject offers psychological safety. It promises control. It tells us that we are captains of our souls. Embracing the holobiont requires admitting that we are porous, vulnerable, and inextricably entangled with things we cannot control. It demands that we surrender the fantasy of the impermeable border. The skin is not a wall; it is a heavily trafficked interface. The state is not a fortress; it is a metabolic node in a planetary flow.

We are living through the friction between our laws and our biology. We legislate for individuals, yet we live as assemblages. We worship independence while our bodies are grounded in interdependence. The future of political theory cannot simply be an adjustment of liberal categories. It requires a fundamental ontological revision that starts with relation rather than separation. We must stop trying to protect the self from the world and begin understanding the self as a spatially intensified instantiation of the world.

Clinging to the myth of the autonomous subject is a massive act of collective denial. It represents a refusal to look at the microscope and see the legions teeming inside us. We construct our societies around a myth of being that does not correspond to biogeochemical reality. The cost of this error is everywhere apparent — in the degradation of our ecology, the polarization of our politics, and the isolation of our private lives. We try to seal ourselves off, creating sterile environments that make us sick, physically and politically. The holobiont offers a different path, one that acknowledges that to be one is always to be many. We are not solitary thinkers looking out at nature. We are nature looking at itself, through a lens made of billions of other lives. The sovereign is dead. Long live the swarm…

“The Sovereign Individual Does Not Exist,” from @nilsgilman.bsky.social.

Further complicating the issue: “Externalities, Rights, and the Problem of Knowledge,” from Cyril Hédoin: 

Very short summary: This essay explains how the knowledge problem [the challenge of a central authority having the information needed to make rational decisions for a complex system like a society] applies to the definition of jurisdictional rights. Jurisdictional rights define spheres of individual sovereignty. Rights are appropriately defined if they internalize all potential externalities. However, individuals may disagree about what counts as an externality. This disagreement stems from individuals’ preferences, which are typically dispersed and local. I discuss various solutions to this problem, including the use of polycentricity...

[Image above: source]

* John Donne

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As we incorporate the interconnected, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species.  Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.

source

#charlesDarwin #culture #darwin #externalities #history #holobiont #individualism #individuality #interconnection #interdependence #philosophy #politics #reason #rights #society #theOriginOfTheSpecies

What is #IndividualistAnarchism?
What is #FreeMarketAntiCapitalism?

Check out our interview with legendary individualist Joe Peacott of the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade. 🔥🏴

🔗 https://youtu.be/EzYL0vKFGrY

@Nalevo #anarchism #mutualism #individualism #libertarianleft #BADPress

A little late for #GivingTuesday, but I’ve set up an online #donation campaign for the #AynRand Institute for my upcoming birthday! Help me create a culture in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness!

https://gofund.me/261995ed

#Objectivism #charity #giving #AtlasShrugged #TheFountainhead #Fountainhead #Anthem #reality #reason #egoism #capitalism #RomanticRealism #America #USA #UnitedStates #LaissezFaire #individualism #IndividualRights