How universal is the Big Five? Lexical studies of personality in African languages complicate the story

Amber Gayle Thalmayer

Abstract

The Big Five model of personality trait structure plays a central role in personality psychology, and Big Five inventories have been translated and exported around the globe. This model was established from initial cross-cultural evidence using lexical studies, a method uniquely well suited to inter-language comparisons. However, later lexical studies in European and Asian languages were equivocal about the Big Five, and recent work in African languages does not replicate the model. What does this mean about the Big Five? In what ways is it appropriate to use globally, and in what ways is it not? In this talk I will present our recent mixed-methods lexical study of personality in Khoekhoegowab, in press at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000372. I will share the approach we used to achieve the largest lexical study yet conducted in Africa, one of few anywhere to rely on community rather than student samples, and a first to incorporate qualitative interviews to supplement quantitative results. The results will be discussed in the context of other evidence from Africa and in Asia, and what this body of work suggests about the Big Five, a model that may reveal as much about the cultural conditions of the industrialized West as about universal human variation.

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