Relationships between Big Five personality traits and individual-level cultural components

Personality and Individual Differences. 2024. Vol. 226.

Minkov M., Schachner M.

Since Hofstede's pioneering work, culture has been studied through ecological (mostly national) patterns of psychological measures, such as values and self-construal’s: self-descriptions operationalized like personality traits. This begs the question of the relationship between these cultural measures (which we call “cultural components”, or CC) and personality traits, such as the Big Five. We performed individual-level analyses of the six CC derived from self-construals in the Minkov-Hofstede model of culture (conformism, social ascendancy, exclusionism, self-esteem, self-stability, and generosity), which has been shown to subsume all replicable dimensions of national culture, plus short Big Five measures. We used two nationally representative samples from two very different cultures: 1500 Mongolians (Study 1) and 3005 US citizens (Study 2). Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the six CC and the Big Five can be modeled as 11 distinct, albeit weakly related dimensions of personality in both cultures. The CC are not structured quite like the Big Five and cannot be easily subsumed under them as Big Five facets. Network analysis at the construct level revealed that the six CC and the Big Five form a complex network in which each CC is related to more than one Big Five and vice versa. Thus, culture can be viewed, among other things, as a system of ecological combinations of personality traits, but these are not to be equated with, and are not reducible to, measures of single Big Five traits or measures of single Big Five facets.

Keywords: culture, personality, Big Five, Minkov-Hofstede model

Publication based on the results of: Comparative studies of culture: theoretical foundations, methodological problems and applications to problems of socio-economic development (2024)