Personality and Cultural Tightness
Ming Cui
In this research project, my objective is to explore the relationships between cultural tightness and personality traits. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility that individuals raised in tight cultures might exhibit lower openness to experience, higher conscientiousness, and possibly less extraversion, among other traits. This project (Pooled_N = 2,324,646) merges large-scale datasets based on the five-factor model of personality and utilizes the tightness scores reported in Eriksson et al. (2021) as predictors for country-level intercepts across these personality domains. These tightness scores correlate strongly with the scores reported by Gelfand et al. (2011), showing a Pearson’s r of 0.84. The 2021 scores were selected for their broader country involvement (i.e., 57 countries).
My findings reveal a significant positive correlation between cultural tightness and the traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness, although it is noteworthy that the coefficient of cultural tightness on conscientiousness was not significant for the IPIP-300 dataset. In contrast, there is a significant negative association between tightness and openness. Furthermore, the project found no significant relationship between tightness and the traits of extraversion and neuroticism/emotional stability.
Additionally, facet-level analyses in the IPIP-120 and IPIP-300 datasets indicated some consistencies. For example, within the domain of conscientiousness, individuals from tighter cultures tend to display greater orderliness, as evidenced by the significant coefficient in the DV_C2_Orderliness model. There were also inconsistencies, such as in the facet of sympathy within the agreeableness domain, where the coefficient of tightness was significant in the IPIP-120 dataset but not in the IPIP-300 dataset.