Title: 11.8 Cultural Understandings of Personality - Psychology 2e | OpenStax
Headings: 11.8
Cultural Understandings of Personality

11.8 Cultural Understandings of Personality
Learning Objectives
Personality in Individualist and Collectivist Cultures
Approaches to Studying Personality in a Cultural Context

Content: Assessors need to have more than a general knowledge of history, tribal differences, contemporary culture on reservations, and levels of acculturation in order to interpret psychological test responses with a minimal bias. Approaches to Studying Personality in a Cultural Context
There are three approaches that can be used to study personality in a cultural context, the cultural-comparative approach; the indigenous approach; and the combined approach, which incorporates elements of both views. Since ideas about personality have a Western basis, the cultural-comparative approach seeks to test Western ideas about personality in other cultures to determine whether they can be generalized and if they have cultural validity (Cheung van de Vijver, & Leong, 2011). For example, recall from the previous section on the trait perspective that researchers used the cultural-comparative approach to test the universality of McCrae and Costa’s Five Factor Model. They found applicability in numerous cultures around the world, with the Big Five factors being stable in many cultures (McCrae & Costa, 1997; McCrae et al., 2005). The indigenous approach came about in reaction to the dominance of Western approaches to the study of personality in non-Western settings (Cheung et al.,