pirical tests of this hypothesis used projective methods like the Ror -
schach Inkblot Test. As we show in Chapter 8, there are good reasons to
be skeptical about Rorschach results, even when the test was adminis -
tered in the culture in which it was invented. Applied abroad, the re -
sults were almost certainly meaningless. They did, however, point to
one conclusion: People in the same culture do not share a single per -
sonality style; there are individual differences everywhere.
For a number of reasons, including the failure of the modal person -
ality hypothesis, both anthropologists and psychologists drifted away
from this topic by the 1960s. One legacy of this period, however, was awidespread belief among social scientists that personality must be fun -
damentally different in markedly different cultures. As recently as 1996
Samuel Juni expressed this view unequivocally:
The simplistic (a posteriori) basis of the Five-Factor Model, as it is derived
from colloquial usage of language, makes the model and its tools intrinsi-cally bound to the culture and language that spawned it. Different culturesand different languages should give rise to other models that have littlechance of being five in number nor of having any of the factors resemblethose derived from the linguistic/social network of middle-class Ameri-cans. (p. 864)
Just as Medieval Europeans imagined the undiscovered peoples of the
world would be monsters, so many contemporary psychologists be-lieved that personality structure in foreign cultures would be entirelydifferent from the familiar FFM.
In the absence of data, that is perhaps a reasonable presumption.
But it would be unfortunate if it were true, because cross-cultural com -
parisons are potentially invaluable as tools for understanding the FFM.
We cannot normally conduct experiments to discover the determinantsof personality traits; it would be both unethical and unfeasible to ma -
nipulate styles of child rearing or levels of prosperity or religious disci -
plines to see if they affected personality structure. But we can compare
individuals in cultures that differ in these regards, and we can poten -
tially learn a good deal from these “natural experiments.”
A Universal Structure
But it would only be possible to compare cultures if the same factors are
found in both. Does lenient discipline in childhood lead to greater86 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD