0.1 Culture and personality  (Page 4/16)

While the list of issues pertaining to cross-cultural research goes on, let’s consider just two more specific issues: cultural flexibility and cultural response sets . Cultural flexibility refers to how individuals are willing to change, or adapt, in situations in which they know there are cultural differences. For example, American businesspeople can stand about 15 minutes of small talk before getting down to business. Their Japanese counterparts, in contrast, consider it important to get to know their business partners, and they are comfortable with hours of conversation about a variety of topics. This would, of course, be an important consideration for anyone studying the relationship between individual personality and success in business situations in this intercultural setting. Cultural response sets refer to how a given culture typically responds. If a given culture is more reserved, and they are asked to rate the importance of some value in comparison to how a more open culture rates that value, a difference in the rating may reflect the cultural difference in responding, rather than the degree to which people in each culture value the variable being measured (Brislin, 2000; Matsumoto&Juang, 2004).

Finally, in light of these challenges, it may be particularly important to conduct cross-cultural validation studies . Rather than testing hypotheses about specific cultural differences, cross-cultural validation studies are used to examine whether a psychological construct that was identified in one culture is meaningful and equivalent in another culture (Brislin, 2000; Matsumoto&Juang, 2004). For example, as we will see in Chapter 7, Erik Erikson did not feel confident in proposing his eight stages of development (the psychosocial crises) until he had confirmed his observations in two separate Native American tribes. He was able to gain the trust of these groups, and thus able to closely observe their child-rearing practices, thanks to the anthropologists who introduced him to the tribes they had been studying for a long time.

Anthropologists have done much more for psychology than merely introducing some psychologists to cultural issues and unique cultural groups. Some of them have had their own interests in personality. Many anthropologists, as well as some psychologists, have relied on ethnographies to report detailed information on the customs, rituals, traditions, beliefs, and the general way of daily life of a given group. They typically immerse themselves in the culture, living for an extended period of time with the group being studied (this helps get past the anxiety of being observed or any lack of cultural flexibility). Comparing the ethnographies of different groups can help guide cross-cultural psychologists in determining the likelihood that their cross-cultural studies are valid (Matsumoto&Juang, 2004; Segall et al., 1990).

Discussion Question: Translating psychological tests into different languages is often a problem for cross-cultural psychologists. Americans have a reputation for only knowing English, whereas people in other countries often speak more than one language. Do you know a foreign language well enough to actually communicate with someone in another country? How important do you think it is to learn another language as part of understanding their culture?