Title: Personality and Culture (sample research paper)
Headings: Personality and Culture: Individualism Versus Collectivism
Personality and Culture: Individualism Versus Collectivism
RUNNING HEAD: Personality and Culture
ABSTRACT
Bibliography

Content: One surprising contrast is in the different emphasis on the natural world; in Shinto, Japans native religion, which is followed alongside many other religions such as Buddhism and Christianity by the majority of Japanese, is an animistic religion which sees the natural world not as separate from humanity, but as the same as it. In Shinto, humans are part of the natural world and are not set apart from the natural world but are instead part of it, and are not set apart by having a soul (Hofstede, 2001). This contrasts sharply with the holdings of Christianity, the most common religion in the United States, which holds that only humans have souls, and as such are unique and special in the natural world. The individualism-collectivism framework is commonly used to describe personality characteristics, habits and traits that arise from cultures in which certain individualist or collectivist traits occur. However, these traits do not occur to exclusion within these cultures, making it unlikely that the traits are wholly attributable to the cultural context (McCrae & Allik, 2002). For example, in Japan it is a cultural norm that individuals will take care of their parents in old age, reflecting the collectivist stance on elder care; in the United States, it is a cultural norm that elders will take care of themselves, or in the worst case will hire someone to do so in an assisted living facility or nursing home. However, there are still Americans who take care of their elder parents in preference to sending them to a hired care facility, and there are also Japanese elders who prefer to continue to live on their own despite their childrens cultural requirement for offering care (Hofstede, 2001). This inconsistency between individual preference and cultural individualism-collectivism ranking highlights the potential difficulty with using the individualism-collectivism framework to explain all variances between individuals of different cultures.