Does personality differ by country?

Does personality differ by country?

Two questions hide inside that one, and they have different answers. The first is whether personality has the same shape everywhere, meaning whether the same dimensions describe people wherever you look. The evidence there is strong and the answer is broadly yes. The second is whether countries differ in average level on those dimensions. That evidence is much weaker than the charts you may have seen: small regional differences show up, and national rankings are not supported by the data that produced them.

The distinction matters because most popular writing answers the first question and then illustrates it with the second. A country average is a fragile number. A factor structure is a robust one.

Do the same personality traits appear in every culture?

They do, with impressive consistency, and the model was not designed in one place and exported. The five-factor taxonomy grew out of decades of lexical research on the trait words ordinary language contains, and survived repeated attempts by its critics to replace it (Goldberg, 1993).

The Big Five Inventory was translated from English into 28 languages and administered to 17,837 people across 56 nations. The five-dimensional structure was robust across the major world regions, meaning the items grouped themselves in the same way in each place rather than requiring a different model for each culture (Schmitt et al., 2007).

Self-report is one window, so the more persuasive result comes from ratings of other people. Students in 50 cultures rated an adult or college-aged person they knew well, using a third-person version of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, producing ratings of 11,985 targets. Within-culture factor analyses clearly replicated the American self-report structure in most cultures, and the structure was recognisable in all of them (McCrae & Terracciano, 2005). The same study found differences between men and women replicating across cultures and being most pronounced in Western ones.

Is there a sixth factor, and does it appear across languages?

There is a serious case for one. Rather than translating an English questionnaire, lexical research starts from the trait words a language already contains and asks how they group. Studies of that kind produced a similar six-factor solution in seven languages: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Polish. The sixth factor is Honesty-Humility, covering sincerity, fairness, modesty and the absence of greed (Ashton et al., 2004).

The other five factors in that solution are close relatives of the Big Five, with two rotated: agreeableness is defined by gentleness and patience and takes anger at its negative pole, and emotionality gathers anxiety, vulnerability and a lack of toughness (Ashton et al., 2004). This is the basis of the HEXACO model, covered on the HEXACO page.

Seven languages is not every language, and the authors present the solution as a proposed reorganisation rather than a settled replacement. What it adds here is a caution: which factors you find depends partly on the words a language gives you to find them with.

Why are country averages so hard to interpret?

Because a national average on a self-report scale is the sum of a real difference and several measurement problems nobody has fully solved. The authors of the 56-nation study discuss limitations of their own data set, including sampling, and caution against reading it as a ranking of nations (Schmitt et al., 2007).

• Reference-group effects. People answering a question like I am hard-working compare themselves with the people around them. Where the local standard is high, a genuinely hard-working person may rate themselves in the middle, and the comparison group changes with the country.
• Translation. A trait adjective rarely has an exact twin in another language. Translating and back-translating controls much of this, and cannot make two words mean the same thing to two cultures.
• Sampling. Most large cross-national datasets rest on students and volunteers, not a random sample of a country. Differences between samples can look like differences between nations.
• Response style. Cultures differ in how readily people use the extreme ends of a rating scale, which shifts a mean without any change in the underlying trait.

None of this makes cross-cultural work useless. It makes the structural findings, which do not depend on the level of the scores, far more trustworthy than the level findings, which do.

What replicates across countries, and what does not?

Read that table as one sentence: the model travels, the scores travel badly.

What does this mean for your own result?

Your percentile is not a statement about you in isolation. It is your score placed against a reference sample, and it moves when that sample changes. A score at the 60th percentile against one group could sit at the 50th or the 70th against another. That is what a percentile is.

So it is fair to ask who you are being compared with, and a test should tell you. Wellington's norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the sample so far is drawn mainly from one country, which we would rather say plainly. If you answer from elsewhere, read your percentile as a comparison with that sample, and allow that it would shift against a local one.

Trait descriptions are less affected. What high Conscientiousness looks like in ordinary behaviour describes a disposition, and the structural evidence above is why it should still make sense across countries even where the average level does not transfer. How to read your personality test scores goes further into percentiles and bands.

How does Wellington handle this?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot asks 60 questions and scores 6 dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. The sixth is there because of the lexical evidence described above (Ashton et al., 2004). Each trait is the average of several statements on a five-point accuracy scale, reported as a percentile against the reference sample, in one of three bands, Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Those norms are provisional and drawn mainly from one country, and the methods page states the current position. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. No card is involved.

Wellington is written in English and has not been validated in translation, so we do not claim cross-cultural equivalence for our own instrument. The Wellington Membership reaches 90 traits, including every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths, and continues toward all 255 traits across eight domains. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Which country has the most extraverted people?

No dataset in this literature supports an answer. The largest cross-national study of the Big Five covers 56 nations and its authors caution against reading it as a ranking, because sampling and other limitations affect the national means (Schmitt et al., 2007). Regional differences do appear, most clearly in openness between South America, East Asia and other regions.

Does the Big Five work in languages other than English?

Yes, on the available evidence. The Big Five Inventory was translated into 28 languages and its five-factor structure held across 56 nations (Schmitt et al., 2007). Lexical studies that start from a language's own trait words rather than a translation recovered a similar six-factor solution in seven languages, including Korean and Hungarian (Ashton et al., 2004).

Are national character stereotypes accurate?

This page cannot answer that from its sources, so it will not try. What the sources do show is that national averages are fragile: sampling, translation and the fact that people rate themselves against those around them all move a country mean without any change in the underlying trait.

Why does my percentile compare me with people in another country?

Because a percentile needs a reference sample, and ours is provisional while the norming sample is completed, drawn mainly from one country. Your answers are yours; the comparison group is what shifts. Expect your percentile to move a little against a different reference sample, and treat a small difference as noise.