How You Feel About People is Related to How You Feel About Cities

There are numerous structural factors that influence people’s attitudes towards cities, including the city’s architecture, size, infrastructure, transport, crime rates, population density, and quality of housing, to name just a few. However, it's also possible that people's own tendencies towards other people influence their attitudes towards cities.

My colleagues and I have investigated whether individual differences in individualism and collectivism predict people's evaluations of cities. Individualism and collectivism are sociocultural orientations towards treating the self and others as individuals or group members respectively. Individualists see themselves and others as being self-reliant, autonomous, and independent, whereas collectivists are more interdependent and concerned about their social groups, including their family, friends, and community. We have investigated whether these dispositional orientations towards the self and others might also influence how people feel about cities.

In our first study, we asked 148 psychology undergraduate students to take virtual guided tours around one of four Utopian historical cities - cities that had never been built and were unfamiliar to our participants. YouTube videos of the four guided tours can be viewed here: Christianopolis, City of the Sun, New Harmony, and Victoria, and the picture below shows a scene from one of the tours. Participants then evaluated the cities’ liveability and environmental quality and completed measures of individualism and collectivism.

A key limitation of this first study was that it lacked ecological validity because it involved nonresidents evaluating novel, historical, virtual, and unpopulated cities. In a follow-up study, we sampled 1,660 residents of four real cities in three countries: Newcastle, Australia; Sydney, Australia; Paris, France; and Istanbul, Turkey. Participants completed an online survey containing measures of individualism, collectivism, city identification, and city evaluation. We did not find reliable results with regards to individualism. However, within each city sample and across the combined samples, a specific measure of collectivism called collective interdependent self-construal was positively related to city evaluation. We also found that city identification mediated this relation. Hence, people's general tendency to construe social groups as part of their self (collectivism; e.g., “The groups I belong to are an important reflection of who I am”) predicted their level of identification with their city (city identification; e.g., "I identify with other people living in Sydney"), which in turn helped to explain their positive appraisal of that city (city evaluation).

The present research results imply that the social psychological group processes that are responsible for people's identification with and evaluation of social groups based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc. may also apply to cities because, at their base, cities are social groups.

For further information please see the following journal articles:

Rubin, M., & Morrison, T. (2014). Individual Differences in individualism and collectivism predict ratings of virtual cities’ liveability and environmental quality The Journal of General Psychology, 141 (4), 348-372. doi: 10.1080/00221309.2014.938721

A free access publisher's version of this article is available here.

A self-archived version of this article is available here.

Rubin, M., Badea, C., Condie, J., Mahfud, Y., Morrison, T., & Peker, M. (2017). Individual differences in collectivism predict city identification and city evaluation in Australian, French, and Turkish cities. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 50, 9-16. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2017.01.007

A self-archived version of this article is available here.