Openness to Experience in adults? It would make no sense to ask that
question in a culture in which there was no Openness factor. Conse -
quently , the first question that must be asked in cross-cultural compari -
sons is whether the structure of personality is basically the same.
There are even more basic questions than this: We could ask
whether the specific traits that define the factors are universal. Perhapsthere is no Openness factor in Culture Xbecause there are no consistent
individual differences in intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sensitivity .There is a yet more basic question: “Do people from all cultures havepersonality traits?” It has been argued (see Church & Katigbak, 2000)that traits are Western inventions, appropriate only to highly individu -
alistic people who define themselves by their personal attributes. In
collectivistic cultures like Japan or Zimbabwe, people may define them -
selves in terms of their interpersonal relationships. Perhaps for such
people the concept of trait is irrelevant.
Although these may seem to be abstract and difficult questions,
there is a straightforward way of addressing them. If we translate thescales of the NEO-PI-R into different languages and administer them tosamples from other cultures, we can try to replicate the factor structure.If the whole notion of traits is meaningless in a given culture, we shouldfind no structure at all. If, on the other hand, we find a structure resem-bling the FFM, it would mean not only that personality trait structure isgeneralizable but also that the individual traits are similar in differentcultures. If Openness to Ideas loads on the Openness factor in cultureX, then there must be systematic individual differences in intellectual
curiosity in culture X. During the past decade dozens of studies have
addressed these issues, and the answer is now clear.
As long ago as 1983, Sybil Eysenck showed that two factors, Neu -
roticism and Extraversion, could be found in many cultures. Lexical re -
searchers in Germany and the Netherlands found versions of the FFM
in their analyses of Dutch- and German-language trait descriptive adjec -
tives (Brokken, 1978; Ostendorf, 1990). But German and Dutch are
closely related to English, since all are from the Germanic branch of theIndo-European language family . Perhaps the FFM is distinctive to Ger -
manic languages.
The universality of the FFM was first clearly established when the
same factor structure was found in the NEO-PI-R when translated intolanguages from several different language families—Indo-European,Hamito-Semitic, Sino-Tibetan—as well as Japanese and Korean, lan -Cross-Cultural Views of Personality and Aging 87