Cultural Influences on Personality

Abstract

Ecologies shape cultures; cultures influence the development of personalities. There are both universal and culture-specific aspects of variation in personality. Some culture-specific aspects correspond to cultural syndromes such as complexity, tightness, individualism, and collectivism. A large body of literature suggests that the Big Five personality factors emerge in various cultures. However, caution is required in arguing for such universality, because most studies have not included emic (culture-specific) traits and have not studied samples that are extremely different in culture from Western samples.

Understanding the Cultural Construction of School Mathematics

“…This way of life interpretation implies a consensus that culture comprises a collective psychological conditioning (Triandis & Suh, 2002). It embodies the "implicitly or explicitly shared abstract ideas about what is good, right, and desirable in a society" (Schwartz, 1999, p. 25), and includes those beliefs, artefacts, practices and institutions that history has shown to be effective for the maintenance of a society and its future generations (Fiske, 2002;Hofstede, 1980;Triandis & Suh, 2002).…”

“…It embodies the "implicitly or explicitly shared abstract ideas about what is good, right, and desirable in a society" (Schwartz, 1999, p. 25), and includes those beliefs, artefacts, practices and institutions that history has shown to be effective for the maintenance of a society and its future generations (Fiske, 2002;Hofstede, 1980;Triandis & Suh, 2002). Cultures are social, historical and behavioural constructions (Fiske, 2002) that reflect the "collective mental programming" of their people (Hofstede, 1980, p. 43).…”

Personality distance and economic activity

“…People are imperfect in assessing their own personalities (the correlations between self-judged and actual scores on factors from the 'Big Five' range from 0.01 to 0.57; the accuracy of judgments falls when assessing the personality of other people [Furnham 1997;Furnham and Chamorro-Premuzic 2004]). Judging the personality of individuals from other countries can be an even more daunting task as the judgment can be distorted by cultural differences [Triandis and Suh 2002;Hofstede and McCrae 2004]. Also the variation of personality traits is greater within a country than between average inhabitants of different countries [Schmitt et al 2007] and thus even if the assessments are not biased by cultural differences, the mean differences could simply not be identified by individuals.…”

Editorial Introduction

“…This way of life interpretation implies a consensus that culture comprises a collective psychological conditioning (Triandis and Suh 2002). It embodies the "implicitly or explicitly shared abstract ideas about what is good, right, and desirable in a society" (Schwartz 1999, p. 25), and includes those beliefs, artefacts, practices and institutions that history has shown to be effective for the maintenance of a society and its future generations (Fiske 2002;Hofstede 1980;Triandis and Suh 2002).…”

“…It embodies the "implicitly or explicitly shared abstract ideas about what is good, right, and desirable in a society" (Schwartz 1999, p. 25), and includes those beliefs, artefacts, practices and institutions that history has shown to be effective for the maintenance of a society and its future generations (Fiske 2002;Hofstede 1980;Triandis and Suh 2002). Cultures are social, historical and behavioural constructions (Fiske 2002) that reflect the "collective mental programming" of their people (Hofstede 1980, p. 43).…”