Occupational Digest

14 February 2012

National culture and personality

If people of different nationalities score differently on a personality  
test, does this say something about national temperament, or simply that the  
test is biased? Prof Dave Bartram took us through an interesting approach to
 unknot this tricky issue: when “national differences” in personality also
 correlate with other measures, we can be more confident they are the real  
deal.

Bartram worked with a big data set - one million participants all  told –
but as the correlations were made between countries, not individuals,  they
involved just 31 cases, a modest sample in which to detect patterns.  
Correlating the Big 5 personality factors with the four Hofstede dimensions of  
national culture, he found that each personality measure correlated with one or
 more Hofstede dimension; for instance, Emotional Stability tended to be
higher  in cultures that are less masculine, more individualistic, more
tolerant of  ambiguity, and have less power distance (meaning less acceptance of
unequally  distributed power).

The next analysis was neat, correlating the cultural  dimensions with the
standard deviation of personality scores in each country –  whether scores
tightly clustered or showed large variation - rather than with  their average
levels. This made it possible to explore the idea that some  countries are
culturally “tighter” than others, giving less scope for individual  
difference. The analysis picked up several such effects. The higher the power  
distance of a culture, the more uniform its members were in terms of measures  
like agreeableness, conscientiousness or extroversion; the reverse was true
for  countries high on another measure, individualism. Even with this small
data set  (the 31 countries) it was possible to predict large amounts of the
variance of  Big 5 measures from the Hofstede scores, as much as 76% in the
case of Emotional  Stability.

Correlation of personality with culture ratings might not  strike you as
objective enough to produce a verdict; perhaps they are both  subject to a
common confound. But how about correlations with hard measures such  as GDP,
life expectancy, UNESCO education index and the UNDP human development  index?
These measures were all found to correlate with standard deviations of  
personality scores, for instance high GDP was related to larger ranges of  
openness to experience in the population.

This study doesn't answer  whether national culture shapes typical
personality or vice versa, although it's  useful in honing hypotheses for
investigating such matters. But this cascade of  correlations does suggest that
personality differences between countries,  although they are small, reflect
something real, rather than meaningless  measurement error.  

Posted by Alex  Fradera