The Geographic Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits

Abstract

The Big Five Inventory (BFI) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, the BFI was translated from English into 28 languages and administered to 17,837 individuals from 56 nations. The resulting cross-cultural data set was used to address three main questions: Does the factor structure of the English BFI fully replicate across cultures? How valid are the BFI trait profiles of individual nations? And how are personality traits distributed throughout the world? The five-dimensional structure was robust across major regions of the world. Trait levels were related in predictable ways to self-esteem, sociosexuality, and national personality profiles. People from the geographic regions of South America and East Asia were significantly different in openness from those inhabiting other world regions. The discussion focuses on limitations of the current data set and important directions for future research.

Escala de Autorrelato de Trapaça-Admissão: Evidências de Validade Fatorial e Precisão

“…Diferentemente do que se presumia a partir da proposta de seus autores (Paulhus et al, 2004), ao menos na cultura brasileira, ele não se apresenta como uni, mas bifatorial. Não obstante, caberá testar se essa estrutura se mantém em outros países, uma vez que atitudes e traços de personalidade, por exemplo, podem ser afetados pelo contexto cultural em que as pessoas estão inseridas, e podem ser mais ou menos endossados (Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, & Benet-Martínez, 2007).…”

Transformational leadership and burnout: The role of thriving and followers’ openness to experience.

“…In a similar way, as mean levels of OTE have been shown to vary across countries and as it has been argued that OTE has a different function in collectivist nations (Hofstede, 2001;Schmitt et al, 2007), it would be worthwhile to investigate the effect of OTE on the TFL-burnout link in various countries.…”

The South African Personality Inventory (SAPI): A culture-informed instrument for the country’s main ethnocultural groups.

“…In the etic, or cross-cultural approach, the focus is on the transferability of models and tools (typically of Western origin) across cultures. A major achievement in this tradition is the wide establishment of the FFM or Big Five (covering the five personality dimensions of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness) and the instruments for its measurement, such as the NEO PI-R (McCrae, 2013), the Big Five Inventory (Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, Benet-Martínez, et al, 2007) and the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP; Ehrhart, Roesch, Ehrhart, & Kilian, 2008). Studies in this line of research have typically found fair support for the replication of the FFM structure across cultures.…”

“…Although the replication of some factors (especially Openness) in some cultural regions (especially Africa) compared to Western targets is sometimes weak, this is typically attributed to issues of data quality rather than model applicability in the respective cultures (McCrae,Terracciano,& 78 Members of the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project, 2005). Using these instruments, no indications have been found that alternative models would be applicable to some cultures or world regions (McCrae et al, 2005;Schmitt et al, 2007;Zecca et al, 2013).…”