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Cross‐cultural Variation in the Importance of Psychological Characteristics: A Seven‐country Study
Author(s) -
Williams John E.,
Saiz José L.,
FormyDuval Deborah L.,
Munick Marci L.,
Fogle Ellen E.,
Adom Ahams,
Haque Abdul,
Neto Felix,
Yu Jiayuan
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
international journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1464-066X
pISSN - 0020-7594
DOI - 10.1080/00207599508246585
Subject(s) - trait , psychology , big five personality traits , personality , china , social psychology , cross cultural , scale (ratio) , cross cultural studies , demography , geography , sociology , cartography , archaeology , computer science , anthropology , programming language
The Psychological Importance (PI) of personality traits is defined as the degree to which they provide information useful in understanding and predicting behaviour. University students from 7 countries (Chile, China, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, and the United States) rated the PI of each of the 300 items of the Adjective Check List along a 5‐point scale. PI was shown to be a meaningful (i.e. reliable) concept in each country. Comparisons of PI ratings between pairs of countries indicated correlations ranging from 0.23 to 0.73, with a mean of 0.49 among the 7 countries. A variety of additional analyses indicated that six of the seven countries tended to group themselves into two clusters: (1) China, Nigeria, and Pakistan; and (2) Chile, Norway, and the United States. In the second cluster, trait importance had a curvilinear relationship to trait favourability (i.e. both good and bad traits may be important) whereas in the first cluster trait importance and favourability had a linear relationship (i.e. only good traits may be important). The findings were suggestive of substantial cross‐cultural differences in the importance assigned to psychological traits.