HC 7 cultural psychology Flashcards
What is personality?
- Aspects of an individual’s unique characteristics
- Enduring behavioral and cognitive characteristics, traits, or predispositions
Trait?
Trait: characteristic or quality distinguishing a person
Identity?
= perceived roles in life, life experiences and narratives, values, and motives
Psychological anthropology approach to personality?
National character: the perception that each culture has a modal personality type, and that most persons in that culture share aspects of it
–> Personality is culture specific and is formed by the unique forces each culture deals
with in its milieu
Etic approach of personality?
= focused on measurement equivalence of imported instruments, looking at an instrument
or theory and making this work across different cultural settings
–> From an outsider perspective focused on cross-cultural comparison
–> Views personality as something discrete and separate from culture, and as an
universal phenomenon that is equivalently relevant and meaningful across cultures
Five factor model (OCEAN model)?
OCEAN model based on five distinct and basic personality dimensions that appear to be
universal for all humans
- Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
- Trait approach (Etic approach)
What studie psycholexical studies?
starting point is the lexicon, what are the words people use to describe others –> started in the English language, and thus from the English-culture perspective
- Is there universality? –> assumption of biological disposition for dimensions
- Are there score differences?
–> dimensions are found around the world, also in non-western contexts
–> not just for self-reports, but also structure found in large scale other-report
What explains the five factor theory?
= explains the source of the traits found to be universal in the five factor model
Traits are:
1. Grounded in basic tendencies (biological)
2. Characteristic adaptations that are basic tendencies shaped by the culture
3. Turned into the self-concept
Difference between five factor model and theory?
- FFT: developed to explain variation
- FFM: atheoretical, psycholexical bottom-up approach
Both are etic approaches, focusing on transporting the theory and model into another context, cross-cultural perspective
trait approach?
traits are the building blocks
Etic approach?
comparative approach
Imposed etic approach?
Something originated in culture A and is taken to other cultures
- Many studies support the model, as it is carefully transported to other cultural
settings –> culture level score differences, groups of people differ on the scales
- But, mean differences between cultures are small, interindividual differences within
cultures are much bigger
- Culture explains 4-17% of the variance
- Large scale studies correlate Big Five with risks for diseases, substance abuse, life
expectancy, etc
Limitation imposed etic approach?
- Implied emphasis on western concepts, as the measures are derived from Englishlanguage personality items and only three of the five factors are really well replicable
- Multiple non-identified sources of bias, response tendencies, blind spots, overemphasis on universality
- Gap between theory and empirical evidence
Emic approach?
= indigenous, culture-specific approach
- Insider approach that believes all cultures to be different and you cannot compare them from the outside
- Reaction to imposed etics, warns about assuming meaning equivalence / construct validity
- Views personality as constellations of traits and characteristics found only in a specific culture, personality and culture are constituted with each other
Limitations emic approach?
Limitations
- Overemphasis on cultural uniqueness
- Initially lacked of methodological rigor
- Need for incremental validity beyond etic measures
