Culture & personality: Five expert visions

Abstract

Research on culture and personality has greatly enhanced personality science by bringing attention to the bidirectional processes by which socio-cultural factors shape personality and individuals in turn shape their social environments to fit and express their personalities. This review showcases the unique perspectives and topical contributions of five different sets of experts, who examine these issues from different standpoints and answer different questions. Specifically, these contributions focus on (1) the usefulness of anthropology-based distributive models of culture, (2) how culture and personality make-up each other, (3) the cultural and ecological basis of wellbeing, (4) how individual personality expressions relate to culture, and (5) the multicultural mind and self. These advances put personality psychology at the center of important current social science debates about the dynamic interplay between macro-level factors and individual variables, and how individuals can best manage cultural diversity and globalization.