Personality and culture

In the end of 1980s only about 10 papers were published each year in journals indexed by theWeb of Sciencewhere 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, & 78Members 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 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