Title: Cultural Understandings of Personality | Introduction to Psychology
Headings: Cultural Understandings of Personality
Cultural Understandings of Personality
Learning Objectives
PERSONALITY IN INDIVIDUALIST AND COLLECTIVIST CULTURES
APPROACHES TO STUDYING PERSONALITY IN A CULTURAL CONTEXT
Summary
Question #1
Self Check Questions
Critical Thinking Question
Answers
Glossary

Content: Individuals who live in countries in Asia, Africa, and South America score high on collectivism (Hofstede, 2001; Triandis, 1995). These values influence personality. For example, Yang (2006) found that people in individualist cultures displayed more personally oriented personality traits, whereas people in collectivist cultures displayed more socially oriented personality traits. 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 traits being stable in many cultures (McCrae & Costa, 1997;