known facts and try to formulate abstract principles that might account
for them. The truth of these accounts has to be tested elsewhere, be -
cause many theories would fit any give set of facts; the right theory must
fit all sets of facts.
We are unaware of any research conducted solely to test FFT, but a
great deal of research is relevant to its assessment. FFT was first formu -
lated for an American Psychological Association symposium held in
1992. At that time, there was very little cross-cultural research on theFFM, and cross-cultural findings played no real role in formulating thetheory . Subsequently cross-cultural research has blossomed, as we sawin Chapter 5. Do the new findings from this line of research fit withFFT, a model that was based on longitudinal studies of Americans? In -
deed they do.
Consider first the invariance of personality structure. As we noted
in Chapter 5, Juni (1996) had explicitly doubted that the five factorsfound in middle-class American samples would be replicated elsewherein the world. If one holds (as almost everyone did—or does!) that per-sonality is shaped by External Influences, then there is every reason toexpect that different traits, or different trait structures, would be foundin South Korea, among Black South Africans, and in Lima, Peru. Thesecultures all differ dramatically from that of the United States in lan-guage, in economic and political systems, and in child-rearing practices.Why wouldn’t they also differ in personality traits?
The Origin Postulate of FFT states that traits are endogenous basic
tendencies, and the Structure Postulate tells us that there are five fac -
tors, namely , Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and
Conscientiousness. There is only one human genome, so FFT predictsthat these five factors will be found in every culture. We have not yetexamined every human culture, but McCrae (2000a) examined 26 cul -
tures and replicated the NEO-PI-R factor structure in all 26 of them.
Samples in Korea (Piedmont & Chae, 1997), South Africa (Heuchart,Parker, Stumpf, & Myburgh, 2000), and Peru (Cassaretto, 1999) allshow the same structure found in the United States. This is all the moreremarkable when it is recalled that the NEO-PI-R had to be translated tobe used in these cultures and something might well have been lost inthe process.
Again, consider age differences. Cross-sectional studies confound
intrinsic maturation with cohort effects and have long been regarded202 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD