Publication of the Month - September
Understanding How Personality Traits Impact Life Outcomes Across Cultures
Published article by Ross Stewart and colleagues.
Personality traits significantly influence various aspects of life, including academic success, socio-economic status, relationship quality, and even treatment outcomes. These links suggest that understanding personality can help inform policies, such as identifying risk factors for behaviours like negative substance use or environmental neglect.
However, the practical relevance of these associations depends on their consistency across different cultures and circumstances. Research shows that while many findings from Western samples replicate within the U.S., the strength of these associations often varies. It's crucial to test whether these patterns hold in diverse cultural settings before applying Western-based interventions globally.
To explore this, the team examined personality traits and life outcomes in three culturally diverse groups: English-speakers (mostly UK residents), Russian-speakers (from Russia or nearby regions), and Mandarin-speakers (mostly from China), totalling 4,052.
Personality Traits and Life Outcomes
Personality is often summarised using the Big Five traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). However, these broad categories might not always be the best predictors of specific outcomes. Narrower traits, like facets and even finer nuances, can often provide stronger and more precise predictions. For example, individual facets of Conscientiousness can predict job performance better than the broader trait itself.
Cross-Cultural Consistency and Diversity
Cross-cultural research shows consistencies and variations in how personality traits relate to outcomes. For instance, while Conscientiousness typically links to lower BMI in Western populations, this association is not seen in some Asian samples. Similarly, traits like Narcissism or Extraversion may have different impacts on life satisfaction or workplace engagement depending on cultural context.
Fewer studies have examined these associations at multiple levels of the personality hierarchy, from broad traits to specific nuances, across diverse cultural groups. This is an area ripe for further exploration to better understand how personality influences outcomes globally.
Current Study: Exploring Cross-Cultural Personality and Outcome Links
This study examines how personality traits predict life outcomes in three culturally diverse groups, focusing on broad traits (domains), narrower traits (facets), and specific behaviours or attitudes (nuances). The team looked at two main aspects: the overall predictability of outcomes from traits and the relationships between individual traits and outcomes. The team expected these relationships to differ across cultures but didn’t have specific predictions about the extent of these variations due to limited prior research.
Personality Traits
The team created a 90-item personality questionnaire specifically for this study, derived from an existing pool of 198 items intended to broadly cover personality traits, while focusing on reliability, variance, and minimising bias. Most items were taken from established sources like the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment (SAPA), with some new additions to ensure comprehensive coverage of the Five Factor Model (FFM) and HEXACO traits, along with additional traits such as competitiveness and humour.
Outcomes
The team assessed 34 outcomes using pre-existing scales and newly written items, focusing on broadly defined and widely applicable measures, such as holding a driver’s license or committing a crime. Translations were completed and verified for Mandarin and Russian versions to ensure accuracy.
The team also measured a range of additional outcomes with single-item questions rated on various Likert scales. These included criminal convictions, charitable donations, driving status and fines, education level, exercise frequency, involvement in physical fights, number of hobbies and holidays, income, relationship status and duration, satisfaction with career, finances, home, and living area, smoking status, social time, and volunteering history.
Results
While there were some inconsistencies in how personality traits were linked with outcomes, particularly for specific outcomes like relationship duration and body weight, there was substantial aggregate robustness. Personality traits’ predictive power remains relevant across cultures, suggesting that findings from Western studies have applicability beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies (Allik et al., 2013; Klein et al., 2018).
Some consistent associations between traits and outcomes, such as the correlation between life satisfaction and happiness, were found across all samples. However, cultural differences influenced the strength of these associations, highlighting the need for context-specific interpretations (Soto, 2019).
The study suggests that interventions might be more effective if tailored to cultural contexts. For instance, anger management may be particularly beneficial in cultures where anger has a stronger impact on outcomes, while engagement-focused interventions might be more suitable in other contexts.
In summary, while cultural differences and measurement challenges exist, the team’s study supports the general relevance of personality traits in predicting outcomes across cultures, with nuances offering the greatest predictive accuracy despite the complexities involved.
Limitations and Future Research
The team’s study, while insightful, has several limitations that future research can address:
The team’s samples were not fully representative of their broader populations. Samples were recruited via social media, potentially excluding non-social media users, and the UK sample came from the Prolific panel, which may attract individuals with more time available. Additionally, the overrepresentation of women in all samples could affect the generalisability of the findings.
Future studies should encompass a wider range of cultural backgrounds to test the generalisability of the team’s findings. The observed patterns might vary with different cultural or contextual factors. Incorporating more objective life-course variables (e.g., grades, income, health records) could provide a more robust understanding of trait-outcome relationships.
Conclusion
In summary, the team’s study demonstrates that trait-outcome associations exhibit moderate cross-sample consistency, indicating that individuals with similar personality traits tend to experience similar outcomes, even across diverse cultural contexts. The evidence supports that nuanced traits tend to be more predictive of outcomes than broader domains and facets. This pattern of higher predictive accuracy for nuances is evident not only within but also across culturally diverse samples, underscoring the robustness of this finding in various contexts. Future research should address the limitations noted and expand the scope to further validate and refine these insights.