National Character Does Not Reflect Mean Personality Trait Levels in 49 Cultures

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By contrast, distinct cultures within countries showed different profiles. In the UK, the profiles of England and Northern Ireland showed no resemblance (ICC = –0.01). Similarly, in the PRC, the profiles of China and Hong Kong showed no resemblance (ICC = –0.25). There is some resemblance between Czech and Slovakian (ICC = 0.43, P < 0.05), and Serbian and Croatian (ICC = 0.43, P < 0.05) profiles; the separation of those nations is relatively recent.

Additionally, we compared NCS scores from the Philippines to ratings made by bicultural raters in an earlier study (20). Because Church and Katigbak used comparative judgments, we created new NCS scores by subtracting Filipino ratings of the typical American from Filipino ratings of the typical Filipino. The correlation of these 30 difference scores with the Church and Katigbak ratings was 0.76, P < 0.001.

Different standards of evaluation across cultures might have affected the results—that is, raters from some cultures may have been more generous or critical in their ratings than raters from other cultures, distorting the comparison across cultures. On the assumption that such biases would affect ratings both of one's own compatriots and of Americans, we calculated difference scores by subtracting each judge's rating of the typical American from his or her rating of the typical compatriot for each NCS item. Assuming that cultures agree on the typical American, this procedure in effect subtracts the bias plus a constant and leaves a potentially better estimate of national character. We standardized the differences as T scores, using difference score normative values from the worldwide sample, excluding the United States. The difference scores were highly correlated with NCS scores (rs = 0.65 to 0.91, P < 0.001) and provided essentially the same results. ICCs between difference scores and NEO-PI-R observer ratings ranged from –0.44 for England to 0.48 for Lebanon (median, 0.03). ICCs between differences scores and NEO-PI-R self-reports ranged from –0.47 for Russia to 0.53 for Poland (median, 0.01). For the five factors, correlations with observer ratings across cultures ranged from 0.08 to 0.23, and those with self-reports ranged from –0.37 to 0.23. These results suggest that the lack of correspondence between NEO-PI-R and NCS profiles is not simply due to different standards of evaluation in different cultures. A different issue concerns the reference-group effect (28), according to which self-reports and observer ratings of individuals are implicitly made by reference to the distribution of scores in the rater's culture. Such an effect would tend to make aggregate personality scores uniform for all cultures, and the failure to find correlations with NCS factors would be due to a lack of variation in aggregate NEO-PI-R means. However, NEO-PI-R means in fact vary systematically across cultures and show strong correlations across methods and with other culture-level variables (12, 14). Thus, the reference-group effect cannot explain the failure to find correlations with NCS scales.

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R.R.M. receives royalties from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of NIH, National Institute on Aging. Czech participation was supported by grant 406/01/1507 from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and is related to research plan AV AV0Z0250504 of the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. S.G.'s participation was supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences. Burkinabé and French Swiss participation was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to J.R. The data collection in Hong Kong was supported by Research Grants Council Direct Allocation Grants (DAG02/03.HSS14 and DAG03/04.HSS14) awarded to M.Y. Data collection in Malaysia was supported by Univesiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Fundamental Research Grant 11JD/015/2003 awarded to K.A.M. Portions of these data were presented at the 113th Convention of the American Psychological Association, August 2005, Washington, DC. For helpful comments on the manuscript, we thank Y. H. Poortinga; for their assistance on this project we thank F. Abal, L. de Almeida, S. Baumann, H. Biggs, D. Bion, A. Butković, C. Y. Carrasquillo, H. W. Carvalho, S. Catty, C.-S. Chan, A. Curbelo, P. Duffill, L. Etcheverry, L. Firpo, J. Gonzalez, A. Gramberg, H. Harrow, H. Imuta, R. Ismail, R. Kamis, S. Kannan, N. Messoulam, F. Molina, M. Montarroyos Calegaro, S. Mosquera, J. C. Munene, V. Najzrova, C. Nathanson, D. Padilla, C. N. Scollon, S. B. Sigurdardottir, A. da Silva Bez, M. Takayama, T. W. Teasdale, L. N. Van Heugten, F. Vera, and J. Villamil.