Personality structure in east and west Africa: Lexical studies of personality in Maa and Supyire-Senufo.

The field of psychology relies heavily on evidence from North America and Northern Europe. Universally-applicable models require input from around the globe. Indigenous lexical studies of personality, which define the most salient person-descriptive concepts and their structure in a population, provide this. Such results are reported from two non-industrialized communities, representing two of the three main language families of Africa, in groups with differing cultural characteristics. Maasai participants, traditionally herders in rural Kenya and Tanzania, have a highly-structured, traditional culture. Supyire-Senufo participants are traditional horticulturalists in Mali. The 203 most common person-descriptive terms in Maasai were administered to 166 participants, who described 320 persons (166 highly-regarded, 154 less so). The optimal emic solution included 5 factors: virtue/moral-character, debilitation/vulnerability, boldness/surgency, hubris/pride, timidity. In the Maasai context, descriptions of well-regarded individuals were exceptionally uniform, suggesting the role of personality language in norm socialization in tight, traditional cultures. In Supyire, 115 participants used 208 person-descriptive terms to describe 227 targets (half highly-regarded). The optimal emic solution included 10 factors: social self-regulation, well-being, vitality/resilience, broadmindedness, diligence versus laziness, madness, stubbornness versus attractiveness, acceptance versus discontent, hurry/worry, peacefulness. The best convergence between the languages was at the three-factor level, where factors relate to moral character, low agreeableness coupled with high extraversion, and emotional stability. Beginning with the four-factor level, content related to local cultural characteristics became apparent. In both languages, two-factor solutions matched the Big Two, but three-, five-, and six-factor solutions failed to overlap with etic Pan-Cultural Three, Big Five, or Big Six models