Personality and Culture

Approximate reading time: 6 minutes

As you have learned in this chapter, personality is shaped by both genetic and environmental factors. The culture in which you live is one of the most important environmental factors that shapes your personality (Triandis & Suh, 2002). The term culture refers to all of the beliefs, customs, art, and traditions of a particular society. Culture is transmitted to people through language as well as through the modelling of culturally acceptable and unacceptable behaviours that are either rewarded or punished (Triandis & Suh, 2002).

Why might it be important to consider cultural influences on personality? Western ideas about personality may not be applicable to other cultures (Benet-Martínez & Oishi, 2008). On the other hand, evolutionary psychologists argue that the five factors in the Big Five reflect universal responses to environmental challenges that existed throughout humans’ ancestral environment and over millennia. According to this view, all humans should share some universal personality traits.

Two approaches that can be used to study personality in a cultural context are the cultural-comparative approach and the Indigenous approach. Because ideas about personality have a Western basis, the cultural-comparative approach seeks to test Western ideas about personality in other cultures to determine whether they can be generalised and if they have cultural validity (Cheung et al., 2011). For example, recall from the trait perspective discussed earlier in this chapter that researchers used the cultural-comparative approach to test the universality of McCrae and Costa’s five-factor model.

Asian cultures are more collectivist, and people in these cultures tend to be less extroverted. In contrast, people in Central and South American cultures tend to score higher on openness to experience, whereas Europeans score higher on neuroticism (Benet-Martínez & Karakitapoğlu-Aygün, 2003). Individualist cultures and collectivist cultures place emphasis on different basic values. People who live in individualist cultures tend to believe that independence, competition, and personal achievement are important. Individuals in Western nations such as the United States, England, and Australia score high on individualism (Oyserman et al., 2002). People who live in collectivist cultures value social harmony, respectfulness, and group needs over individual needs. These values influence personality. For example, Kuo-Shu Yang (2006) found that people in individualist cultures displayed more personally oriented personality traits, whereas people in collectivist cultures displayed more socially oriented personality traits.

The Indigenous approach came about in reaction to the dominance of Western approaches to the study of personality in non-Western settings (Cheung et al., 2011). Personality traits may be understood differently or have unique expressions in Indigenous cultures, possibly influenced by language and cultural contexts (Heine & Buchtel, 2009). The Indigenous model emphasises developing assessment instruments based on constructs relevant to the specific culture being studied. This approach involves translating personality assessment instruments into other languages, considering cultural perspectives, and incorporating Indigenous views on personality traits and development.

Jacob Burack, Erin Gurr, Emily Stubbert, and Vanessa Weva (2019) argue that Indigenous identity in Canada is poorly understood because there is enormous variety in the culture, language, and traditions of Indigenous communities in Canada. The history before, during, and after the colonization by Europeans differs between Indigenous communities, as do social and economic conditions, resources, and geography. Indigenous Peoples in Canada share a history of colonization, oppression, displacement from traditional territories, forced cultural assimilation, and genocide. The Canadian government and its representatives subjected Indigenous communities to forced relocation, family separation, and residential schools which were frequent sources of psychological, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Thus, the collective history, trauma, and resilience of Indigenous Peoples in Canada provides multiple sources of influence on personality development that may have intergenerational effects.

As well as the influence of collective historical effects, personality is also shaped within one’s own Indigenous community and its understanding of personality development, which may include concepts unfamiliar to people outside of that culture. Instead of thinking that Indigenous experience is all the same, to understand personality development, we need to know about the particular culture and its shared history (Burack et al., 2019). Furthermore, in the development of personality, Indigenous youth must navigate a relationship with mainstream Canadian society and its environmental influences. Taken together, understanding personality in a culture different to one’s own requires a careful and systematic study of all of the historical, shared, and individual environmental influences that shape personality. With respect to Canadian Indigenous communities, this requires a willingness to seek to understand the consequences of a long history of colonization, oppression, and resilience that followed an even longer history of self-sufficiency, sovereignty, and cultural and linguistic traditions.

Keeping in mind the limitations of personality assessment tools rooted in Western theories, let’s explore some of these widely used assessments in the following section.