Cross‐cultural Variation in the Importance of Psychological Characteristics: A Seven‐country Study

Abstract

The Psychological Importance (PI) of personality traits is defined as the degree to which they provide information useful in understanding and predicting behaviour. University students from 7 countries (Chile, China, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, and the United States) rated the PI of each of the 300 items of the Adjective Check List along a 5‐point scale. PI was shown to be a meaningful (i.e. reliable) concept in each country. Comparisons of PI ratings between pairs of countries indicated correlations ranging from 0.23 to 0.73, with a mean of 0.49 among the 7 countries. A variety of additional analyses indicated that six of the seven countries tended to group themselves into two clusters: (1) China, Nigeria, and Pakistan; and (2) Chile, Norway, and the United States. In the second cluster, trait importance had a curvilinear relationship to trait favourability (i.e. both good and bad traits may be important) whereas in the first cluster trait importance and favourability had a linear relationship (i.e. only good traits may be important). The findings were suggestive of substantial cross‐cultural differences in the importance assigned to psychological traits.

Personality Traits Moderate the Effect of Workload Sources on Perceived Workload in Flying Column Police Officers

“…Moreover, the results might have limited generalizability also due to cultural and temporal issues. The importance of personality traits varies with cultures (Williams et al, 2010 ). Moreover, different countries might also have different screening procedures for selecting police officers and a different public's attitude toward their conduct, which, in turn, depends on the zeitgeist and the dominant political orientation at a given time.…”

Testing the lexical hypothesis: Are socially important traits more densely reflected in the English lexicon?

“…For instance, McCrae and Costa (1999) considered the related five factors to be “basic tendencies” that “explain much of what defines the individual person” (p. 160). As noted by Williams and colleagues (1995), important traits by this operationalization are “not necessarily the same as the relative importance of traits as judged by outside observers” (p. 531).…”

Cultural differences in prioritizing applicant attributes when assessing employment suitability

“…Because personality attributes were rated as equally useful regardless of whether targets were local employees or expatriates, it was argued that the cultural context might be unimportant (Ones & Viswesvaran, 1999). However, cultures differ in how they rank different psychological attributes (Williams et al, 1995). To the degree that culture provides differing frames of shared meaning, raters from different cultures may evaluate the same applicant differently.…”