Comparability of Personality Self ‐ Ratings Across Cultures Two happy-ending stories René...
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Transcript of Comparability of Personality Self ‐ Ratings Across Cultures Two happy-ending stories René...
Comparability of Personality Self‐Ratings Comparability of Personality Self‐Ratings AcrossAcross CulturesCultures
Two happy-ending storiesTwo happy-ending stories
René Mõttus, Jüri Allik, Anu RealoRené Mõttus, Jüri Allik, Anu Realo
University of TartuUniversity of Tartu
The problem
When subjective ratings are used for cross-cultural comparisons, researchers sometimes do not like the results
It's not only in psychology:
Chinese have more political freedom than Mexicans?
People live longer where they describe themselves being more ill?
The personality example: Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness ~ tendency of being organized, dependable, purposeful, controlled
The Distribution of Conscientiousness across the World:
– The highest scoring countries – Senegal, Benin
– The lowest scoring countries – Japan, South-Korea
High Conscientiousness predicts low GDP and poor health
“I am a reliable person” “I am often late”
The same responses to personality test items may refer to different trait levels in different cultures (Heine et al., 2008)
The same trait-related information is “translated” into ratings in different ways
Culture-sepcific standards for the behaviours that characterize conscientiousness:
– Being “on time” means a 25min time-window in US but 39min in Morocco (White, Valk & Dialmy, in press)
As a result, in some cultures, self-ratings tend to be low simply because everyone is rated according to harsh standards, and vice versa
Is there anything we can do?
We should make the differences in standards measurable
Having measured the standards, we could correct self-ratings accordingly
Haven't been done too often in cross-cultural personality
studies
A simple solution, and cheap as chips
The technique of anchoring vignettes (King et al., 2004)
We have to ask everyone to rate something (relevant) that is the same for everyone:
Short descriptions of hypothetical persons displaying various levels of the trait (called anchoring vignettes)
The vignettes are the same for everyone, thus any variance in their ratings can only reflect biases and error
If the ratings differ systematically across cultures, this probably shows culture-specific standards for the trait
Moreover, vignettes can do magic
Self-ratings can be “fixed” by anchoring them to vignette-ratings:
Vignettes are the common norm/baseline for everyone
Self-ratings can be anhored to the common norm
Anchored self-ratings are free from culture-specific standards, being thus more easily comparable
Recoded self-fatings y ~ vign
1 y < vign1
2 y = vign1
3 vign1 < y < vign2
4 y = vign2
5 vign2 < y < vign3
6 y = vign3
7 vign3 < y < vign4
8 y = vign4
9 vign4 < y < vign5
10 y = vign5
11 y > vign5
The first study ...
… with
Helle Pullmann, Jerome Rossier, Gregory Zecca, Jennifer Ah-Kion, Dénis Amoussou-Yéyé, Martin Bäckström, Rasa Barkauskiene,
Oumar Barry, Uma Bhowon, Fredrik Björklund, Aleksandra Bochaver, Konstantin Bochaver, Deon de Bruin, Helena Cabrera, Sylvia
Xiaohua Chen, A. Timothy Church, Dougoumalé Cissé, Daouda Donatien Dahourou, Xiaohang Feng, Yanjun Guan, Hyi-Sung Hwang, Fazilah Idris, Marcia S. Katigbak, Peter Kuppens, Anna Kwiatkowska,
Alfredas Laurinavicius, Khairul Anwar Mastor, David Matsumoto, Rainer Riemann, Joanna Schug, Brian Simpson, Caroline Ng Tseung
Country Language N
Australia English 463
Benin French 107
BurkinaFaso French 96
China (Changchun) Chinese 110
China (Beijing) Chinese 150
Estonia Estonian 110
Germany German 70
Hong-Kong Chinese 158
Japan Japanese 107
Lihtuania Lihtuanian 125
Malaysia Malay 211
Mali French 93
Mauritius French 100
Philippines Filipino 133
Poland Polish 100
Russia Russian 100
Senegal French 115
South-Africa English 109
South-Korea Korean 142
Sweden Swedish 100
Switzerland French 101
USA English 165
21 cultures,22 samples2,965 respondents
Capable, efficient, competent __ __ __ __ __ Inept, unprepared
Disorganized, sloppy __ __ __ __ __ Organized, neat, methodical
Dutiful, scrupulous __ __ __ __ __ Unreliable, undependable
Lazy, unambitious, aimless __ __ __ __ __ Ambitious, workaholic
Disciplined, persistent, strong-willed __ __ __ __ __ Procrastinating, quitting, weak
Spontaneous, careless, thoughtless __ __ __ __ __ Cautious, reflective, careful
I am ...
The person is ...
[Marc] often feels incapable of deciding and finding solutions to his problems. He always turns to his relatives and acquaintances for help and sometimes they indeed help him. However, at times the opinions of other people disagree, which makes it even more difficult for [Marc] to work out what he should do.
[30 vignettes displaying various levels of conscientiousness]
We recoded self-ratings in relation to vignette-ratings
– recoding expected to correct for the effect os potentially differing standards
Country rankings on self-rated Conscientiousness before and after correcting
– rank-order correlations from 0.78 to 0.92 (median 0.86)
Before and after correcting self-ratings
Rankings of cultures on Dutifulness
Before correcting After correcting1 Benin Benin2 Burkina Faso Burkina Faso3 Senegal Senegal4 China (Changchun) China (Changchun)5 China (Beijing) Mali6 Mali China (Beijing)7 South-Africa Poland8 Poland Estonia9 Malaysia South-Africa
10 Mauritius Malaysia11 Sweden Switzerland12 Philippines Philippines13 Germany USA14 Switzerland Mauritius15 USA Sweden16 South-Korea Lithuania17 Hong Kong Australia18 Estonia Russia19 Australia Germany20 Lithuania Hong Kong21 Russia Japan22 Japan South-Korea
The troubled children
Life-expec tancy
Com
pete
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Ach
ieve
men
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f-Dis
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-0 ,8
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U n co rre cte d s e lf-ra tin g s C o rre cte d s e lf-ra tin g s
GD P
Com
pete
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Dut
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Ach
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U n co rre cte d s e lf-ra tin g s C o rre cte d s e lf-ra tin g s
Something else must be twisting the rankings of cultures on Conscientiousness (different self-enhancement)
Or rankings of cultures are accurate, but our expectations about them are wrong*
Not much evidence for the effect of differing standards
* If our data does not support our hypotheses, though highly unlikely, it is sometimes possible that we started with incorrect hypothesis
A closer look on the predictive validity of culture-level mean Conscientiousness scores:
– Is the situation that bad afterall?
The second study
Conscientiousness has only been seen as a monolothic construct
– While it also has facets
The selection of criteria has not been rigorous enough:
– Theoretically unclear why high GDP should be related to high Conscientiousness
– Criteria not representative of populations
Previous studies haven't been good enough
Used facets in addition to domain scores
Used a larger sample of criteria:
– If we are not sure about the relationships of single criteria to aggregate Conscientiousness, let's try multiple criteria and hope to see at least some meaningful relationships
– Criteria from different categories:
• Indicative of behaviours of individuals (CVD prevalence)
• Indicative of societies in more general and abstract ways (economic freedom)
What we did (better, of course)
Different facets had different patterns of correlations to the criteria*
Mõttus, Allik, & Realo, 2010* Goodbye, Conscientiousness ...
In some facets, the observed correlations matched the predicted correlations to moderate degree
In some facets, the observed correlations contradicted the predicted correlations
Mõttus, Allik, & Realo, 2010
A closer look at the relationship of culture-level mean Conscientiousness scores to supposedly relevant criteria showed that sometimes personality scores predict criteria in an expected manner
Given that we bearly have any idea how the relationships should go (e.g. does culture influence personality or vice-versa), the amount of signal that we detected in the noise may be seen as a fairly good result
It's not that bad afterall
Sure there are loads of problems related to self-reports, especially when we try to compare them across cultures (e.g. differential self-enhancement)
– But there is no evidence for the particular DIF resulting from differential standards, at least for Conscientiousness and according to the vignettes-techique
– Like a detective story: the folk that everyone has been suspecting has an alibi afterall
• But who is the murder then?
Culture-level mean Conscientiousness scores do not perfectly predict things that researchers guess might be related to it:
– But why should they predict the criteria in the first place?
– The criteria and personality are both products of about a billion of things – expecting clear relationships with good effect sizes might be a naïve idea to start with
As we all know, most of the societal indicators are predicted by IQ differences between populations
– IQ predicts nearly everything with effect sizes well bove 0.70
– OK, a few historical-political things also matter
If this is true, there is not much variance in the societal indicators to be explained by personality
– If we assume personality to be causal thing
An ironic (or maybe not?) remark