Personality and culture - Wiley Online Library

European Journal of Personality
Eur. J. Pers. 23: 149–152 (2009)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.718
Editorial
Personality and Culture
In the end of 1980s only about 10 papers were published each year in journals indexed by
the Web of Science where the both terms ‘personality’ and ‘culture’ appeared conjointly in
the title, abstract or keywords. In the last couple of years, however, about 120 such papers
were published annually. Perhaps more importantly the relationship between personality
and culture is less frequently studied from the point of view of mere ethnographic curiosity
or as another example of idiosyncrasy. It is more common now that cross-cultural studies of
personality are inspired by a desire to solve more fundamental problems: How do different
personality types adapt to various cultures? How do specific personality traits support
cultural practices in the societies in which people live? In what way the mean personality
can shape culture (Allik & McCrae, 2002).
The development of wide-bandwidth personality questionnaires such as 16PF, EPQ and
NEO-PI in English gave an incentive to psychologists of other countries to translate these
instruments into their own languages. The first attempts were encouraging (e.g. Church,
1987) and soon it was possible to hypothesize that the patterns of covariation among
personality traits in English-speaking populations can be generalized to diverse cultures
and distinct language families suggesting that personality trait structure is universal to the
whole human species (McCrae & Costa, 1997). In a little while it became also clear that the
generalizability of the trait structure is neither depending on the observer’s perspective
(McCrae, Terracciano, & 78 Members of the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project, 2005)
nor on the measuring instrument (Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, & Benet-Martinez, 2007).
Nevertheless, the standard doctrine, borrowed from the anthropology, that culture shapes
personality, largely through child-reading practices, was still the dominating one.
Summarizing research that was done during the previous decade on the intersection of
culture and personality it was still necessary to warn readers that a caution is required in
arguing for cross-cultural universality of the personality trait structure (Triandis & Suh,
2002). The following years have proved that the structure of personality traits, particularly
the five-factor model of personality, emerges quite consistently across cultures leaving
space for relatively small but still meaningful variations (Heine & Buchtel, 2009).
These small cross-cultural variations in the mean levels of personality traits turned to
have a regular geographic pattern (Allik & McCrae, 2004) which were replicable in a large
number of cultures (McCrae, Terracciano, & 79 Members of the Personality Profiles of
Cultures Project, 2005; Schmitt et al., 2007). These large cross-cultural studies of
personality lead to a question which appeared meaningless only a couple of years before:
how aggregate personality trait determine the type of culture in particular countries
(Hofstede & McCrae, 2004). However, the observed geographical pattern of personality
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150 Editorial
traits was not always in accordance with the common sense. It is hard to convince both
experts and lay persons that Japanese respondents, for example, are low in order,
dutifulness, and self-discipline because they regularly score very low on the
conscientiousness scale. Or what sense it does make that in those US states where
people score high on conscientiousness the rate of murder and robbery per capita is higher?
(Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008). The picture became even more complex when it
turned out that those beliefs people hold about personality characteristics typical of
members of their own cultures do not converge with assessed traits (Terracciano et al.,
2005). These discrepancies pose some methodological challenges for comparison of
personality traits across cultures (Ashton, 2007; Heine, Buchtel, & Norenzayan, 2008;
Perugini & Richetin, 2007).
Although tendencies to experience either positive or negative emotions are one of the
most reliable indicators of personality dispositions (Watson, 2000), personality psychology
and psychology of emotions have developed according to their own separate paths. While
early personality psychologists were primarily inspired by Margaret Mead, researchers of
human emotions were simply unable to escape from the powerful ideas of Charles Darwin.
This is one of the reasons why the big six basic emotions (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen,
1969) were accepted earlier than the idea of the big five personality traits. Further research
has convincingly demonstrated that universality emotions spreads also to antecedents of
emotions (Scherer, 1997) and their display rules (Matsumoto, 1990). While links between
studies of emotion and personality are growing stronger, Matsumoto proposed that many
cross-cultural differences in the perception, expression and interpretation of emotions can
be explained by personality traits (Matsumoto, 2006). A parallel development in these two
areas, personality and emotion research, is by itself a strong argument that they could
benefit from emerging integration between these areas.
This special issue contains six papers from the leading research groups which have been
instrumental in the shaping of the personality-culture and personality-emotions research
areas during the last two decades. As the editors of the special issue we are hoping that
these six papers contain several new ideas and findings that could stimulate progress in
these two areas.
Timothy Church (2009) discusses a possible integration of trait and cultural psychology
perspectives, two dominant theoretical approaches in the study of culture and personality.
This paper summarize the results of cross-cultural studies Church and his colleagues have
conducted to test elements of this integrated perspective and draw a roadmap in which
direction future studies could be planned.
Steven Heine (Falk, Heine, Yuki, & Takemura, 2009) and his colleagues return to the
problem why Westerners self-enhance more than East Asians, at least when it concerns
traditional self-report questionnaires. One way to answer this question is to use some
alternative assessment techniques, particularly the implicit association tests. Their study
provides an answer to the question how much the implicit association test are suited for the
study of cultural differences and which method gives the best approximation to ‘true’ selffeelings.
Robert McCrae (2009) are introducing a new concept—ethos—in addition to more
studied assessed personality traits and national character stereotypes. Ethos is social
institutions that reflect the operation of personality traits. Although experts can reliably
estimate ethos in Japan and US these measures of ethos are not reducible to aggregate
personality traits or national character stereotypes suggesting that these three layers related
to personality are operating relatively independently in the society.
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DOI: 10.1002/per

Editorial 151
Realo et al. (2009) try to solve a puzzle why national character stereotypes do not agree
with assessed personality traits. One possible answer is that national character stereotypes
are not describing personality stereotypes of one’s own nation but they are formed in
contrast to the perception of a dominant neighbouring nation or to people’s self-rated
personality traits: the typical in-group or out-group member is portrayed in less socially
desirable terms than people’s ratings of their own personality.
Matsumoto, Hee Yoo and Fontaine, 2009 and his colleagues introduce a concept called
context differentiation (CD) demonstrating how cultural display rules for emotional
expressions are associated with context. Findings indicate that cultures were reliably
associated with measures of CD. The framework and findings provide a platform for future
research examining how individuals differentiate their behaviours across contexts, and how
cultures facilitate that differentiation.
Klaus Scherer and his team (Scherer & Brosch, 2009) try to elucidate how cultural
factors may encourage the development of affective personality traits or emotional
dispositions by producing or rewarding specific appraisal biases. They propose that cultural
beliefs, values or practices may encourage certain types of appraisal bias and may thus
provide an explanation for widely held stereotypes about cultural affect patterns.
We believe that all these six studies exploring the relationship between personality and
culture in their own way advance our current knowledge in the result of which we will be
more prepared to understand both human personality and human culture.
JÜRI ALLIK and ANU REALO
Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Estonia
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Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Pers. 23: 149–152 (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/per