12.1 Personality Assessment across Cultures

Assessing Personality Differences Across Cultures: A Surprising Challenge

Which culture is the most extraverted? Which culture is the most conscientious? Which culture has the most competitive people? Although such questions are certainly interesting, they are surprisingly difficult to answer. Recall that the predominant method of assessing personality is the objective self-report inventory (also known as the Big Five Inventory). One of the most significant challenges to cross-cultural personality assessment is constructing a self-report inventory that will be interpreted similarly across cultures. Although words typically have literal translations in other languages, those translated words may be less common or used in different contexts. For instance, the concept of “love” exists in most cultures, but it takes on different meanings (for example, sexual, romantic, or transactional) and is used in different situations. Thus, translation difficulties alone may change how people respond to an inventory, creating the illusion of differences between cultures or obscuring differences that do exist.

Another challenge to assessing personality differences across cultures is that people use numeric scales differently. For instance, how would you answer the following question?

On a scale of 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much), how outgoing are you?

Within your specific culture, comparing your answer to another person’s answer may reveal a real similarity or difference between you and the other person in terms of extraversion. However, we have to take into account that different cultures use numbers and scales differently. In particular, cultures vary widely on whether they consider the endpoints of scales to be acceptable answers. For instance, even within the United States, Hispanic people use the extremes of 5-point scales more frequently than non-Hispanic people do (Hui and Triandis, 1989). Furthermore, Black people use the extremes more often than White people do, and White people use the extremes more often than Asian people do. So, two equally outgoing people from different cultures may respond differently just because they think about the extremes differently. Now, imagine further complicating cross-cultural comparisons by expanding them to include countries with different languages!

In light of these difficulties, is it possible to know anything about cultural differences in personality? Researchers have strived to rigorously study the Big Five across cultures. The Big Five Inventory was originally constructed from an extensive analysis of the English language, so researchers feared it may not capture personality across cultures all that well. Fortunately, research suggests the opposite. For instance, one study found that responses to the Big Five Inventory were remarkably similar in structure and type in both Barcelona, Spain, and in California, United States (Benet-Martinez & John, 1998). The same seems to be true in other cultures that have been examined. In other words, the basic pillars of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) seem to exist across cultures, capturing significant variability in human personality.

However, even though all five personality factors may exist across cultures, some factors are more important in some cultures than in others (McCrae, 2002). For instance, openness to experience is often perceived as highly desirable in the United States. However, in a culture with more rigid norms and strict expectations regarding adherence to those norms, openness to experience might be more of a liability. Moreover, cultures differ in what each of these traits looks like in day-to-day life (Benet-Martinez & John, 1998). For example, North Americans tend to prefer high-arousal leisure activities (Tsai, 2007), meaning a highly extraverted White person might frequently engage in social activities such as dancing at clubs or playing sports. In contrast, East Asians tend to prefer low-arousal leisure activities, meaning a highly extraverted Chinese person might frequently engage in social activities such as sightseeing or hosting dinner parties.

In short, we will likely never have definitive answers regarding how people across cultures differ in personality. However, psychologists currently believe between-culture differences are relatively small compared to within-culture differences (Stackhouse et al., 2024). That is, your personality is probably more different from that of your neighbor than from the personality of the average person in another culture.