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The scale you completed is The Individualism-Collectivism scale created by Singelis and colleagues (1995). Even though the scale is given to individuals, the concepts of individualism and collectivism are used to describe entire cultures and they refer to the level of independence-interdependence among people in that culture. Individualist cultures tend to emphasize self-reliance, independence and (sometimes) competition. Individual needs take precedence over the needs of the group and the self is seen as a unique and separate entity. Collectivist cultures, on the other hand, tend to emphasize cooperation, and (sometimes) equality. Group needs take precedence over individual needs and the self is seen as a member of a group.
The idea behind the scale is to test whether people's scores on the Individualism-Collectivism scale relate to other moral differences. It has been argued by some theorists (originally Carol Gilligan) that women have a more interdependent sense of self, and they feel their connections to others more strongly. You can see if this prediction holds up in the graph below. We are also interested in how this trait may relate to politics. We suspect that there is no simple relationship between individualism-collectivism and liberalism-conservatism. There are ways of being an individualist liberal and of being an individualist conservative. We will also examine the relationship between scores on this test and scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which you probably took earlier, to see if those "five foundations of morality" reveal a more nuanced relationship between morality and individualism-collectivism.
The figure below shows separate scores for Individualism and Collectivism. The green bars show your scores, the brown bars show the scores of the average male participant and the orange bars show the scores of the average female participant.
To learn more about individualism and collectivism and the scale that you just complete you can read the following article: Singelis, T. M., Triandis, H. C., Bhawuk, D., & Gelfand, M. J. (1995). Horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism: A theoretical and measurement refinement. Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science, 29, 240-275.
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