Personality and culture revisited: Integrating the social cognitive approach to personality and the dynamic constructivist approach to culture

Restricted until 26 July 2009.The study of personality and culture has a long and distinguished tradition in psychology and anthropology. Recently, research on personality and culture has focused almost exclusively on profiling people from different cultures on personality trait measures. In this dissertation, I first consider two problems that may confound the results from the recent work: the reference group effect (Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002), and lay theories of personality traits in different cultures. To address these two problems, at the theoretical level, I propose an alternative perspective that integrates the social cognitive approach to personality (Mischel & Shoda, 1995, 1998) and the dynamic constructivist approach to culture (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000). Essentially, this new perspective argues that personality and culture can be meaningfully conceptualized and operationalized in terms of distinctive patterns of if (situation) then (behavior) contingencies and explanations for the contingencies. At the empirical level, it is shown that while personality profiles based solely upon personality trait measures suggested that Americans are equally extraverted, less agreeable, more conscientious, equally emotionally stable, and more open to new experiences than Chinese, the profiles based upon the new perspective of situations, behaviors, and explanations suggested that Americans are more extraverted, slightly more agreeable, more conscientious, emotionally more stable, and equally open to new experiences than Chinese. Advantages and implications of this new perspective and a number of opportunities it opens for personality and culture research in the future are discussed