guages that are not classified into any larger language family (McCrae &
Costa, 1997b). Since that time, the FFM has been replicated in lan -
guages from the Bantu, Malayo-Polynesian, Uralic, and Altaic language
families, in more than two dozen different cultures (McCrae, 2000a).Table 9 illustrates the findings. In it, the adult American factor structure(Costa & McCrae, 1992b) is reproduced alongside the factor structurefound in Indonesia (Halim, 2001) in a small sample of women collegestudents. Although the two structures are not identical—for example,Excitement Seeking is more strongly related to Openness than toExtraversion in the Indonesian sample—it is clear that the same fivefactors are found in both samples, despite differences in language, cul -
ture, and age of the samples.
Curiously , this discovery has been greeted with mixed feelings by
the community of cross-cultural psychologists. It is considered by somea form of Western imperialism that an instrument developed by Ameri-cans in English to describe the personality structure of Americans hasbeen imposed on the rest of the world. The imputation of conquest isseen in Michael Bond’s (2000) whimsical assertion that “with the publi-cation of McCrae and Costa’s (1997b) article in the American Psycholo-
gisttitled ‘Personality Trait Structure as a Human Universal,’ the pacifi-
cation of the known personological world may now be complete”(p. 63). That sentiment aside, critics make the legitimate point thatthis research does not address the possibility that there are other,indigenous, factors that may be unique to other cultures. For example,the NEO-PI-R does not include scales to measure Chinese Tradition(Cheung & Leung, 1998), so there is no possibility that a Chinese Tra -
dition factor would emerge, even when the instrument is administered
in Chinese. A conservative interpretation of the data to date would bethat personality traits in all cultures studied so far include the FFM, al -
though some may also have other dimensions of personality .
Western civilization does have a history of imperialism that was of -
ten brutal to indigenous cultures, and cross-cultural psychologists are
right to be vigilant about repeating those misdeeds in science. But West -
ern intellectuals also have a tradition of idealizing non-Western cul -
tures, from the notion of the noble savage to present-day claims of the
irreducible uniqueness of different cultures (Shweder & Sullivan, 1990).In the long run, it may be that the best way to promote human under -
standing is not only by celebrating diversity but also by showing that all88 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD