A professor of Arizona State University, Igor Grossmann with co-author Michael E. W. Varnum published a study called “Social Class, Culture, and Cognition” in the Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal. In this study, Grossmann used his findings to insinuate that the indications of society moving towards a more individualistic state were prevalent hundreds of years ago, and have been increasing ever since. The study was a case study and only viewed individualism in the United States.
Their study focused on observing the correlations between indicators of individualism and social class. What they found was that the more well-off a person or family was, the higher the social class that they were a part of, the more apparent were the individualistic traits that they were testing. Such traits included urbanization, secularism, socio-economic structure, climatic demands, infectious disease and disaster. The main aim was to establish that the trend toward individualism was perhaps brought about by a change in social class structure. Or in the words of Grossmann, “changes in the social class structure precede changes in individualism”. Using America as an example, Grossmann makes the observation that as Americans gained more education and overall more wealth they switched from manual labor to office jobs. This shift an individualistic one because, as the results of the paper indicated, both wealth and education are major indicators that foster individualistic tendencies.
Grossmann and Varnum also focused on Russia as well as America. Their class structure imitates that of the Eastern World, being much more collectivist and favoring interdependence rather than independence among it's citizens. Using the social, natural, and economic indicators of individualism and collectivism, the study found that Russia, like America, had the same correlation between social class structure and the appearance of those individualistic traits. This means that regardless of culture, there seems to be an indication across all six factors tested that there is an overall trend of increasing individualism.