The Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Cultures

335 Pages·2002·9.19 MB·English

by  Robert R. McCrae

The Five-Factor Model
of Personality Across Cultures
International and Cultural Psychology Series
Series Editor: Anthony Marsella, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii
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THE FIVE-FACTOR MODEL OF PERSONALITY ACROSS CULTURES
Edited by Robert R. McCrae and Juri Allik
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The Five-Factor Model of
Personality Across Cultures
Edited by
Robert R. McCrae
National Institute on Aging
Baltimore, Maryland
Jiiri Allik
University of Tartu
Tartu, Estonia
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-306-47355-5 ISBN 978-1-4615-0763-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-0763-5
©2oo2 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers in 2002
Softcover reprint of the hardcover l st edition 2002
Ali rights reserved
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Robert R. McCrae and Juri Allik
Section I: Intercultural Studies 5
Cross-Cultural Generalizability of the Five-Factor Model of Personality 7
Jean-Pierre Rolland
Exploring the Sources of Variations in the Structure of Personality Traits 29
Across Cultures
Kenn Konstabel, Anu Realo, and Talvi Kallasmaa
The NEO Five-Factor Inventory in Czech, Polish, and Slovak Contexts 53
Martina HfebiCkova, Tomas Urbanek, Ivo Cermak, Piotr Szarota,
Emilia Fickova, and Lucia Orlicka
Relating the Five-Factor Model of Personality to a Circumplex 79
Model of Affect: A Five Language Study
Michelle S. M. Yik, James A. Russell, Chang-Kyu Ahn,
Jose Miguel Fernandez Dols, and Naoto Suzuki
NEO-PI-R Data from 36 Cultures: 105
Further Intercultural Comparisons
Robert R. McCrae
Section II: Case Studies In Personality And Culture 127
The Five-Factor Model in the Philippines: 129
Investigating Trait Structure and Levels Across Cultures
A. Timothy Church and Marcia S. Katigbak
The Applicability of the Five-Factor Model in a Sub-Saharan Culture: 155
The NEO-PI-R in Shona
Ralph L. Piedmont, Elaine Rain, Robert R. McCrae, and Paul T. Costa, Jr.
Five-Factor Model and the NEO-PI-R in Turkey 175
Sami GUlgjjz
v
vi
Vietnamese-American Personality and Acculturation: 197
An Exploration of Relations Between Personality Traits and Cultural Goals
April Leininger
The Five-Factor Model of Personality:
Measurement and Correlates in the Indian Context 227
P. H. Lodhi, Savita Deo, and Vivek M. Belhekar
Personality and Culture:
The Portuguese Case 249
Margarida Pedroso de Lima
Applications of the Russian NEO-PI-R 261
Thomas A. Martin, Paul T. Costa, Jr., Valery E. Oryol,
Alexey A. Rukavishnikov, and Ivan G. Senin
Section III: Methodological And Theoretical Perspectives 279
Cross-Cultural Equivalence of the Big Five: 281
A Tentative Interpretation ofthe Evidence
Ype H. Poortinga, Fons J. R. Van de Vijver, and Dianne A. Van Hemert
A Five-Factor Theory Perspective 303
Juri AlUk and Robert R. McCrae
Author Index 323
Subject Index 331
The Five-Factor Model
of Personality Across Cultures
INTRODUCTION
ROBERT R. MCCRAE* & JuRI ALLIK**
*Nationallnstitute on Aging, **University of Tartu, Estonia
Personality psychology has become an international enterprise. To take an example at
random, the eight personality articles in the December, 2001, issue of the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology included contributions from the United States,
Canada, Germany, Finland, and Israel. For the most part, international personality
research is not cross-cultural; it is simply personality research conducted in different
countries. The implicit assumption behind this practice is that personality processes are
universal, and where they are studied is thus of no consequence. An insensitivity to cul
tural context once imputed mostly to Americans now appears to characterize the field
worldwide.
Fortunately, recent years have also seen a rise of interest in studies of personality
and culture (Church, 2001; Church & Lonner, 1998; Lee, McCauley, & Draguns, 1999;
McCrae, 2000). What do these new studies show? Are personality processes indeed
universal, or are there significant variations across cultures that necessitate a more
nuanced approach to research? There is as yet no definitive answer to that question. In
some respects, human personality does seem to transcend the boundaries of language
and culture; in other respects, it is profoundly influenced by social and historical forces.
Sorting these issues out must be a priority for our field if we are to understand the
current personality literature.
The substantive focus of this book is the Five-Factor Model of personality (FFM;
Digman, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992). The FFM is a hierarchical model of trait struc
ture, in which relatively narrow and specific traits are organized in terms offive broad
factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and
Conscientiousness. Proponents of the model claim that it is comprehensive-that is,
that it encompasses all major dimensions of personality, and thus supercedes older trait
models like Eysenck's (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) and Guilford's (Guilford & Zimmer
man, 1976). This claim to comprehensiveness makes it a natural choice for cross
cultural research.
Although the model can be traced back at least to 1961 (Tupes & Christal, 1961/
1992), it established itself as the dominant model of personality structure in the
2 MCCRAE & ALLIK
1980s. At that time, cross-cultural replications (Amelang & Borkenau, 1982; Bond,
1979; Brokken, 1978) were vital in gaining widespread acceptance for the FFM. In fact,
by 1992 Costa and McCrae (1992a) had identified universality as one of the reasons the
five factors should be considered "basic"-although the evidence in favor of univer
sality then was slim by today's standards.
As a general model of personality trait structure, the FFM can be assessed with a
wide variety of instruments, including existing inventories such as the Personality
Research Form (Jackson, 1984; Paunonen, Jackson, Trzebinski, & Forsterling, 1992)
and new measures developed specifically to assess it (De Raad & Perugini, in press).
Most of the articles in the present book, however, employ the Revised NEO Personality
Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992b). The NEO-PI-R assesses 30 specific
traits or facets, six for each of the five factors. The NEO-PI-R (with its short form, the
NEO Five-Factor Inventory) is the most widely used measure of the FFM, both in the
United States and around the world. As this book documents, dozens of translations and
adaptations have been made. Many of the chapters address the adequacy of translations
and assess the universality of the model. By and large, the instrument appears to work
well in translation.
NEO-PI-R translators have been encouraged to collaborate, and for the XXVIIth
International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm, JUri Allik organized a symposium
on personality and culture and invited them to contribute (Allik & McCrae, 2000). So
many researchers expressed interest that it was necessary to schedule two symposia.
Many of the talks given there became the basis of chapters in this book. Other chapters
were solicited to provide a balance of topics, perspectives, and geographical regions.
The resulting chapters include data representing 40 cultures, 5 continents, and Indo
European, Altaic, Uralic, Harnito-Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Dravidian, Austro
Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Bantu languages (plus Japanese and Korean).
Although the emphasis varies, there appear to be three recurring concerns in the
chapters. The first is the psychometric properties of the personality measure. By and
large, these analyses are familiar assessments of internal consistency, factor structure,
and convergent and discriminant validity. Such analyses are the foundation for sub
sequent use of any translation and are understandably the first priority for many
authors.
The second concern is with the generalizability or cultural specificity of various
properties of the model. Most of the chapters in the first section of the book address this
issue. The general conclusion seems to be that the basic features of the instrument-and
thus of personality trait structure-seem to generalize well, but that there may be some
interesting variations in specifics.
Finally, there is recurring interest in the issue of national character and its relation to
mean personality profiles. Can one interpret mean personality trait scores as an
indicator of common personality features, and can one compare cultures on these traits?
If NEO-PI-R scores for Extraversion are higher in Norway than in Hong Kong, does
that mean that Norwegians are really more extraverted? And might that fact be used to
explain differences between the two cultures in customs and institutions? A few years
ago, anyone trained in cross-cultural psychology would have answered with a quick and
resounding "No!" There are many convincing reasons to doubt that different trans-
INTRODUCTION 3
lations will have the scalar equivalence (Van de Vijver & Leung, 1997) that would be
necessary to justify such comparisons.
But a recent, large-scale intercultural comparison (McCrae, 2001) provided
evidence that personality scales may be more robust than methodologists had presumed.
Perhaps because the many sources of error cancel out, it is possible to obtain
meaningful results when raw scores are compared across cultures. By extension, it
should be possible to interpret scores within a culture in terms of a universal metric.
However, evidence presented by McCrae (2001) and by Church and Katigbak in
this volume suggests that these mean profiles do not match stereotypical judgments of
national character, even when these judgments are provided by experts. How and why
this should be so, and what it implies for the validity of personality measures, is open to
debate. Given this uncertainty, most journal editors would probably discourage
interpretation of mean levels. Here, however, we have adopted the opposite approach,
encouraging contributors to speculate on the possible meaning of the personality pro
files they find. We hope this exploration will provide clues to the real meaning of
personality profiles in translation.
For Allik's Stockholm symposia, panelists were asked to address a "Five-Factor
Theory Perspective." Five-Factor Theory (McCrae & Costa, 1996, 1999) is an attempt
to make sense of the research results associated with the FFM in terms of a broader
personality system. It was initially developed to account for personality stability and
change (Costa & McCrae, 1994), but it can also illuminate cross-cultural research. The
last section of this book is devoted to a critical overview of the book and to an
assessment of its findings in terms of Five-Factor Theory.
As the chapters of this book show, international personality research is flourishing,
and it is beginning to incorporate a sensitivity to cultural context that can only improve
the quality of research. There is much more to personality than traits, but the traits of
the FFM appear to offer a solid basis for cross-cultural research in personality.
REFERENCES
AlIik, J., & McCrae, R. R. (2000, July). Personality and culture: The Five-Factor Theory perspective.
Symposium presented at the XXVIIth International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Ameiang, M., & Borkenau, P. (1982). Uber die faktorielle Struktur und externe Validitl!.t einiger Fragebogen
Skalen zur Erfassung von Dimensionen der Extraversion und emotionalen Labilitl!.t [On the factor
structure and external validity of some questionnaire scales measuring dimensions of extraversion and
neuroticism]. Zeitschriftfiir Differentielle und Diagnostische Psychologie, 3, 119-146.
Bond, M. H. (1979). Dimensions used in perceiving peers: Cross-cultural comparisons of Hong Kong,
Japanese, American, and Filipino university students. International Journal of Psychology, ]4,47-56.
Brokken, F. B. (1978). The language of personality. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
Groningen.
Church, A. T. (Ed.). (2001). Culture and personality [Special issue]. Journal of Personality, 69(6).
Church, A. T., & Lonner, W. J. (Eds.). (1998). Personality and its measurement in cross-cultural perspective
[Special issue]. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 29(1).
Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (I 992a). Four ways five factors are basic. Personality and Individual
Differences, 13,653-665.
Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (l992b). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-P1-R) and NEO Five
Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1994). "Set like plaster"? Evidence for the stability of adult personality. In
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