Hofstede's cultural dimensions help us as a psychologically understanding culture to best differentiate between members of different communities that may cause variables in psychological studies. One of these possible variables is a difference in cooperative focus varying by different cultures. Cooperation is defined as: The act of working or acting together to achieve a common goal, and a cultures' focus on cooperation can cause differences in the outcome of studied data. To better corroborate this theory, take the video we watched in class as an example, where both Asian and American students were asked questions about their personal attributes. The American students dended to focus more on illustrating their positive self sufficient qualities, showing that they could accomplish tasks typically on their own without the help of others. However the Asian students had a significantly different response when asked about themselves. The Asian students tended to focus a lot more on their flaws, things that they wished to change in order to be more constructive members of a group, in orther words, they focused a lot more centrally on what they could help contribute to a community effort. This word, with the same meaning in different cultures shows that there are substantial variables in psychological study in Hogstede's cultural dimensions are not taken into accound.
As another prominent example towards differences in cooperative focus, you can take different religions and compare them, such as the Buddhists and the Protestants. The typical Buddhist focus is on community, and by helping others through cooperation. However, the protestant religion tends to focus more on individual self sufficiency, helping others by not need help yourself. Even under religious boundaries a cultural difference can drastically change a view of cooperation, and it occurs because of Hofstede's cultural dimensions.
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