Personality and Environmental Factors - Part III (Culture)

Culture can be defined as everything handed down through generations to us – traditions, customs, values, beliefs, and even objects. One of the greatest 20th century anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn said that culture is to society what memory is to the individual (Kluckhohn, 1954). In contrast to culture, personality cannot be passed over a long time without genetic connection even if the environment (i.e., culture) is kept similar. That is, imagine that you adopt a child, and it grows to have a similar personality as yours. Years later your adopted child is an adult and adopts a child too, bringing it up just as you brought your child. How much of your personality will be in your grandchild’s personality? Don’t worry, Loehlin (2005) already has an answer for you. He extracted correlations from 59 published studies where a parent and a child were concurrently assessed on diverse sets of personality scales. The mean correlation between the personality scales of a parent and an adopted child was .04. As the more statistically-minded of you know, a correlation varies between -1.00 and 1.00 and absolute values below .20 are considered weak, values of .20 to .50 are considered moderate, and values above .50 are considered strong. Thus, within one generation, without the effect of nature, nurture can pass only weakly from parent to child. But culture can pass much more successfully because values, traditions, and customs are learned from the whole environment, one is surrounded with culture’s artifacts, and one basically lives within a specific culture from their time of birth. Thus, some aspects of our personality – like our values – are expected to naturally relate to culture.

There are many topics we could address regarding personality and culture – for example, the personality of peoples from indigenous cultures, values differences across cultures, personality of people who associate with two cultures, loose and tight cultures’ implications for personality, differences between personalities of people from the East and the West, personality in dignity and honor cultures, etc. Given our limited space we will address one culture topic which I believe will chime with any of my readers – the personality differences of people coming from individualistic cultures and collectivistic cultures. Cultures can be classified according to several dimensions - power distance (how much less powerful individuals accept inequality and status differences), uncertainty avoidance (the extent to which members of a society or culture find uncertainty, risk, change, and ambiguity threatening), masculinity-femininity (how much a culture values assertiveness and achievement versus caring and supporting others), and individualism-collectivism. The latter dimension, being the one most researched and generalizable across different cultures, is the topic we are going into.

In individualistic cultures the ties between people are loose and people ties prioritize their own goals and preferences, they perceive and act from the viewpoint of their independent Self (i.e., I am independent, I am different, I want to express myself, I seek my own happiness, and others should respect that.). In collectivistic cultures people prioritize the goals of their in-groups such as extended family, ethnic group, and national state, behave according to the prescribed norms in these groups and understand them-Selves interdependently (I respect my ancestors, family, and nation, and it is my duty to respect their rules and pursue their goals). These two perspectives – the independent Self and the interdependent Self were introduced first by Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) analysis of Asian versus American cultures which has become somewhat of a classic in the fields of social and cross-cultural psychology.

Because the distinction between individualistic and collectivistic cultures is a fundamental one, any country can be placed on the continuum between the two. The conceptualization of the distinction came from Hofstede’s (1980) analysis of IBM employee preferences from 40 countries and three world regions. Although still somewhat controversial among psychologists and sociologists, Hofstede’s distinction between individualistic and collectivistic nations got traction and became something of a staple in cross-cultural psychology (Smith & Easterbrook, 2021). One caveat though. We should not equate cultures with nations as political entities. Cultures have subcultures and each nation or state might have many subcultures, and at the same time each culture may have many nations or states underneath itself.

Let us give a very long example here due to the sentimentalities of your author and the culture he came from. For example, on the Balkans, which is by far the most nationally and culturally divided region of Europe (hence the term Balkanization), different cultures or should I say subcultures cohabitate within each country. For example, Serbians, Bulgarians, and Greeks, who fought among each other so many times over the last thousand years, in fact share overlapping cultural traditions to a great extent because of Orthodox Christianity’s role in shaping these nations during the Middle Ages. If you ask a random Greek, Bulgarian, or Serbian if they are from the same, call it Balkan culture, the more nationalistic would respond No with utter indignation - they are Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs. Until you see them wearing their traditional embroidered costumes so uniquely ornate and dazzling yet so similar in the fragments and cuts, they cook moussaka with eggplant or potatoes but still cook moussaka, they grow dill and basil in their gardens, sip on their coffees regardless of the time of the day and how much work is waiting to be done (ha-ha workaholic Germans), celebrate with their families with home-distilled beverages of fruit origin, and tell their children folk stories about dragons who stole maidens and woodland fairies who trapped young lads. Only then you, the observant traveler, realize, “Wait a minute”, this is all the same place, these state borders are just the result of 19th century nationalisms, this is indeed the old Balkan, people have been here thousands of years, mixing, sharing, living together regardless of what bloodthirsty thoughts their kings had against each other. Yes, there are subcultures, but undoubtedly they are part of the same culture.

Now, let us return to business. What is the relationship between personality and culture? Regarding Big Five, Allik and McCrae’s (2004) 36-nations study using the NEO personality inventory indicated that individualistic European and American cultures are characterized by high Extraversion and Openness. A similar, 31-nation study using another widely respected personality inventory – the OPQ – supported the association between Extraversion and individualism (Bartram, 2013). Both studies found Neuroticism to strongly relate to another of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions - uncertainty avoidance. It makes sense that the two factors which deal with socializing, asserting oneself, experimenting and accepting egalitarian values relate to Individualism. Also, it makes perfect sense that more neurotic people when grouped together would be anxious with uncertainty as a synonym for threat, and try to avoid it.?

Eventually, when in Rome one needs to do what the Romans do. Personality might start genetically and then the environment and upbringing put its stamp on it, but eventually it is the changing environment that can spur personality development. This is what McCrae and his colleagues (McCrae et al., 1998) found with Chinese immigrants in Canada. The longer the immigrants lived in Canada, the more similar their Agreeableness and Openness were to Chinese respondents born and raised in Canada. Let us also not forget that culture influences our judgements of other people’s personality. For example, in McCrae et al.’s (1998) study, the researchers found that Hong Kong-born Chinese respondents judged more harshly other people on the Vulnerability facet of Neuroticism and the Competence facet of Conscientiousness. This effect was not found in Canadian-born Chinese respondents and leads to the conclusion that culture in Hong Kong (i.e., China) expects individuals to be very competent, efficient, and good at coping with stress. Thus, it seems that personality is judged not in a vacuum but with regards to what one’s culture requires as normal and acceptable. For example, if your friend from Southern Europe tells you they are considered on the quieter side in their country, but you cannot edge a word in between when they start speaking, don’t be surprised where the disconnect might be coming from.

Culture seems to have its own personality and it is much more heritable than ours. We are born in a culture and many of us live and will die within the same culture. But some of us who have emigrated from their home countries and moved to a country with drastically different culture truly learn the enormous importance culture exerts on the expression of our personalities. For example, what was perfectly appropriate to say in a very outspoken and egalitarian culture in Western Europe is accepted as bad manners and insulting in the culture of the US Midwest. You do not tell people they look fatter since last time, even if you like them, you are supposed to start first by talking about the weather and what you ate last night. Only very trusted friends are allowed to talk about body weight to each other. I am sorry for my American readers, but as an European sometimes it is really funny talking with you because talking turns into figuring out what not to say instead of what to say.

The expectations of the people are different and one either conforms, fights, or, as most of us usually end up doing, tweaks their personality here and there to be effective in the new culture. Which is a great testimony to the power of self-development. It used to be that immigrants arriving from Europe to the US would forbid their kids to speak their European languages so that they are fully Americanized. This practice nowadays could get criticized as being too rough and disrespecting diversity. But, hey, it worked and guaranteed success in the new environment. The melting pot, that is how New York used to be known, right? And besides, to the credit of these old immigration generations, they still continued cooking the same food and celebrating the same religious holidays, passing down the same family relationships, and being proud of their family names. Every Italian American knows what I am talking about, just ask them about their grandmother’s wedding soup recipe. Again, when in Rome, please do as the Romans. What is important though is for us not to forget some fundamental principles. Being able to share good food and laugh with people from diverse cultures tells a lot about a personality that has grown mature...

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Kluckhohn, C. (1954). Southwestern studies of culture and personality.?American Anthropologist,?56(4), 685-697.

Loehlin, J. C. (2005). Resemblance in personality and attitudes between parents and their children.?Unequal chances: Family background and economic success, 192-207.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.?Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.?

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture and organizations.?International studies of management & organization,?10(4), 15-41.

Allik, J., & McCrae, R. R. (2004). Toward a geography of personality traits: Patterns of profiles across 36 cultures.?Journal of cross-cultural psychology,?35(1), 13-28.

Bartram, D. (2013). Scalar equivalence of OPQ32: Big Five profiles of 31 countries.?Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,?44(1), 61-83.

McCrae, R. R., Yik, M. S. M., Trapnell, P. D., Bond, M. H., & Paulhus, D. L. (1998). Interpreting personality profiles across cultures: Bilingual, acculturation, and peer rating studies of Chinese undergraduates.?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(4), 1041–1055.