Big Five Across 56 Nations 1 Running Head: BIG FIVE TRAITS ACROSS 56 NATIONS The Worldwide Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits: Patterns and Profiles of Human Self-Description Across 56 Nations

The Big Five Inventory (BFI; V. Benet-Martínez and O. P. John, 1998) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, the BFI was translated from English into 29 languages and administered to 17,837 individuals from 56 nations. The resulting cross-cultural dataset was used to address three main issues. First, we examined whether the factor structure of the English BFI fully replicated across cultures. We found the five-dimensional structure of the BFI was highly robust across major regions of the world, including North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Moreover, all five personality trait scales displayed high levels of internal reliability across world regions. The second objective was to evaluate the validity of the BFI trait profiles of individual nations. We found that trait levels provided by the BFI were related in predictable ways to self-esteem, sociosexuality, and to national personality profiles previously reported in the literature, providing converging evidence that the BFI accurately captures culture-level variation in personality. A third objective was to document the worldwide distribution of personality traits as measured by the BFI. We found, for example, that people from the geographic regions of South America and East Asia were significantly different in openness from those inhabiting other world regions, with the former being more open and the latter reporting less openness than people from other regions. Discussion focuses on limitations of the current dataset, and on important directions for future research. Note: Please do not cite or circulate this manuscript without first author’s permission. Big Five Across 56 Nations 3 The Worldwide Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits: Patterns and Profiles of Human Self-Description Across 56 Nations Many popular psychological assessment instruments, originally developed in English, have been translated into numerous languages and are now commonly used throughout the world (e.g., Butcher, Lim, & Nezami, 1998; Nichols, Padilla, & Gomez-Maqueo, 2000). Most of these translations were made with an explicit or at least tacit assumption that the core psychological constructs assessed by the measures substantively transcend human language and culture. Some researchers have expressed concern with this assumption (Cheung & Leung, 1998; Misra, 1994; Shweder, 1990) and have questioned whether the uncritical extension of Western ways of thinking to the rest of the world should serve as standard practice in psychological science (cf. Church, 2000). Although many of these issues remain unresolved (Triandis, 1997), what seems clear is that when psychological measures are simply translated from their original English and etically imported “as-is” into diverse cultures, comparing the assessment results from different cultures becomes highly problematic (Brislin, 1993; van de Vijver, 2000). Problems in Comparing Personality Trait Scores Across Cultures For psychologists seeking to investigate personality traits across cultures, one of the more vexing problems has centered on determining whether personality trait scales show conceptual equivalence across cultures (Brislin, 1993; Triandis, 1994). Particularly troublesome has been establishing whether the mean scores across different cultures show metric equivalence (Byrne & Campbell, 1999; Little, 2000). That is, when comparing the mean scores of different cultures on a personality trait scale, any observed differences may be due not only to a real cultural disparity on some personality trait, but also to inappropriate translations, biased sampling, or the nonidentical response styles prevalent in various cultures (Diener & Suh, 2001; Grimm & Church, Big Five Across 56 Nations 4 1999; van de Vijver, 2000). All of these factors can be difficult to fully control, making some methodologists extremely skeptical about achieving true metric comparability of scores on the same test in different languages and/or cultures (see Poortinga & van Hemert, 2001; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Although much of this skepticism is certainly warranted, new research methods and analysis strategies are emerging that facilitate the comparability of cross-cultural personality data (Allen & Walsh, 2000; Cheung & Rensvold, 2000). Among the more common methods for establishing the cross-cultural comparability of personality trait measures is to first show that the trait scales contained in the measures are internally reliable across all targeted languages and cultures. A second frequently employed technique is to demonstrate a high degree of factorial structure invariance across different linguistic and cultural contexts (e.g., Vittorio, Barbaranelli, Bermudez, Maslach, & Ruch, 2000). In both instances, if psychometric problems are identified with particular scale items or constructs, new items and/or translations are sometimes implemented to improve the comparability of measures (Brislin, 1986; van de Vijver, 2000). Historically, if trait scales from a personality measure showed high internal reliability and equivalent factorial structure across different languages and cultures, comparing the mean scores across cultures was often deemed a reasonable next step (see van de Vijver & Leung, 2001). However, even with evidence of high internal reliability and factorial equivalence, problems can remain in how to metrically interpret mean-level differences in personality traits across cultures (Byrne & Campbell, 1999; Little, 2000). Another way to increase confidence in the cross-cultural comparability of personality measures is to show that the mean-levels of different assessment instruments intended to measure the same construct, or approximately the same construct, are highly correlated across Big Five Across 56 Nations 5 multiple languages and/or cultures. For example, if two conceptually similar personality trait scales are used in a large number of different cultures, a positive association between the meanlevels of those trait scales across the broad set of cultures would provide evidence that both measures are tapping the same underlying construct (Campbell & Fiske, 1959; Cronbach & Meehl, 1955; Messick, 1995). Of course, in order to analyze the comparability of personality measures using this cross-cultural convergent validation strategy, large numbers of cultures must be studied using conceptually similar measures of personality. Until recently, this potentially powerful method of cross-cultural/cross-language measurement validation was rarely employed, mainly because few worldwide personality datasets have been available for statistically meaningful comparisons to be made. Most largescale studies of psychological attributes have been primarily interested in social attitudes and values, not in stable and enduring personality dispositions. A few items included in these worldwide studies may have some relevance for the measurement of personality traits. For example, several items of Hofstede’s (2001) study of work-related values are interpretable as indicators of dispositions towards anxiety or neuroticism. The World Values Survey, covering 65 countries representing more than 75% of the world’s population, contains items (e.g., “Most people can be trusted”) that are somewhat similar to those by which personality psychologists usually measure agreeable tendencies toward other people (Inglehart & Baker, 2000). Still, studies using full personality trait scales in large numbers of languages and cultures have been heretofore extremely rare. Previous Large-Scale Studies of Personality Traits Across Cultures One of the first comprehensive personality trait measures to enjoy worldwide popularity and a fairly large number of translations into different languages was Eysenck’s Personality Big Five Across 56 Nations 6 Questionnaire (EPQ; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975). In 1984, mean-level trait scores from 25 countries were made available (Barrett & Eysenck, 1984). Ten years later, the number of countries in which three broad personality traits—Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Psychoticism—were measured by the EPQ was expanded to 37 (Lynn & Martin, 1995). In both published reports, the internal reliability and factorial structure of the EPQ across languages and cultures appeared psychometrically sound. However, because no other large personality datasets were available for comparison, it remained unclear as to whether mean-level differences in EPQ scores across cultures converged with other similar measures. Again, such cross-cultural construct validity evidence would have made it more likely that national differences in personality as measured by the three broad trait scales of the EPQ were due to real cultural disparities, and not some other biasing factors. Over the past few decades, many personality psychologists, especially those influenced by the lexical approach to person description (De Raad, 2000; Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1982), have come to view personality traits in terms of five comprehensive dimensions, popularly known as the “Big Five” of human personality (see Goldberg, 1990; John, 1990). The idea that five dimensions can provide a useful framework for understanding higher-order differences between individuals has, according to many, reached something of a consensus among personality trait psychologists (McCrae & Costa, 1999; Wiggins & Trapnell, 1997). The Big Five dimensions of personality include two traits very similar to traits from the EPQ: Extraversion (sometimes called Surgency), which is the degree to which one is active, assertive, talkative, and so forth (see Watson & Clark, 1997); and Neuroticism (versus Emotional Stability), which is the degree to which one