human beings are fundamentally alike. The universality of the FFM is
an important contribution to that effort.
ADULT DEVELOPMENT ACROSS CULTURES
In the mid-1990s colleagues in Europe developed a new translation ofthe NEO-PI-R. They followed our standard procedure: Psychologistsnative to the culture translated the items, with more attention to con -
veying the constructs than to producing a literal, word-for-word transla -
tion. Other scholars, unfamiliar with the NEO-PI-R, then translated the
new version back into English. We reviewed the English back-translationto make sure the sense had been preserved. When there appeared to beproblems (typically in less than 10% of the items), we asked them to tryagain, and the process was repeated until an acceptable back-translationhad been achieved.
These colleagues then administered their instrument to a sample of
students and their parents, and sent us a table of means and standarddeviations for the two samples. At the time, we had no experience com-paring average or mean levels across cultures, so we could not commenton what the mean levels meant. But we did notice that there was some-thing odd about the data. When the students were compared to theadults, they scored lower on Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness,and higher on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness—students ap-peared to be more mature, serious, conservative, helpful and disciplinedthan their parents. This is, of course, the opposite pattern from thatfound in Americans.
For all we knew at that time, personality development might be
very different in the United States and in Europe. Still, it seemed oddthat the pattern was exactly reversed, so we considered another hypoth -
esis. Was it possible, we asked our colleagues, that they had scored the
test wrong, such that high and low scores were reversed? A week laterwe got a reply: They had checked their scoring program, and, yes, it hadbeen reversed. New , corrected mean levels showed that students wereactually higher in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness, and lowerin Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.
A few days later the full import of that news dawned on us: When
scored correctly , this European sample showed exactly the same pattern
of personality development we had seen in Americans. Was this just a90 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD