Controversitial Question

[arsisabelle]

Good evening,

I am not a personality specialist, so with a sample as large and diversified as the HCP, I was wondering how does the Big Five personality test handle differences across gender of across nations? Could there be a cultural confound for those personality measures? Are personality traits calculated the same way for males and female gender, or across culture? I could see behaviours being less acceptable in and nation than in an other, as an example.

That might be a bit controversial as a question, but I am genuinely curious, is there some ways that the Big five test has found to handle that? Is there an adjustment done to the scores in different countries or with genders? Is that taken into account when examining the neuroimaging data?

As I mentioned, I am not a personality specialist, so perhaps this is not relevent, but could not help but wonder :)

Thank you in advance for your precisions!

Isabelle

[harveyaa]

Hi Isabelle,

I'm sorry I didn't see this for so long!
First, I am also not a personality specialist (but I have done some research on the Big Five). The model was designed by studying verbal descriptions of behaviour and personality traits and grouping them. The idea of the five main traits is to have the most independent and representative traits. I am having a hard time finding the paper I read about the process, but when I track it down I will add a link to it. It's really interesting and they provide some good visualizations of the overlap between the traits.

Since the model is based on language and behaviour, it is totally dependent on culture. There are actually many versions of the Big Five for different languages and cultures, some have more or less traits and some also have five but that aren't the same. The wikipedia page has a bunch of leads to studies comparing diffferent cultures and political systems using these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cultural_differences . There are gender differences as well that apparently hold up across regions, but I don't know much about the research. I think part of the idea of the Big Five is to make comparisons between different groups based on the same test so I'm not sure if they handle it in the sense of a confounding factor.

For the HCP, they administered the test as a simple and relatively short questionnaire (I belive 60 questions) that is the same for all participants. I didn't take into account gender in analyzing the neuroimaging data since this project was an introduction for me, and according to their documentation I don't think the HCP do in the preprocessing either (I'm actually not sure if this is a common question or not). The HCP was based in the US, and I'm assuming the participants were all american. Information about the participants background is (very reasonably) not released publicly, so I can't know for sure but hopefully the cultural differences among participants wouldn't be so dramatic that the Big Five is not a useful way to describe personality.

Thank you for the questions! I wish I could provide deeper answers, but I definitely have more reading to do first.

Annabelle

[arsisabelle]

Cool! Really interesting to know! Thank you very much for all the information and precisions! Interesting to see personality might vary among cultures indeed! Fair enough as well for the gender, especially for the analysis. Even though we are becoming increasingly aware of gender differences, other than balancing groups, I don't know how common of a practice it is to handle gender in preprocessing steps. It might actually be a cool project for BHS students next year to see how much of a difference that would make. Perhaps it would not really affect the data?

In any case, thank you for answering my questions and satisfying my curiosity! :)
Have a great day,

Isabelle