Negotiating across cultures: Your assessment of "personality" might be wrong

Modern personality tests assume that all people have five basic personality traits: conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, extroversion and agreeableness. In a new study, researchers suggest that while such tests might be a valuable research tool in mostly white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies countries, they might be less useful for studying people in other societies.

For example, “there were striking differences in how people responded to questions regarding cognitive abilities and conscientiousness. Prior research has shown a connection between cognitive abilities and success in complex jobs in typical WEIRD societies—while conscientiousness plays a bigger role in less-complex jobs. In many of the survey responses from non-WEIRD societies, however, the opposite appeared to be true. [Researchers] also found many instances of conflicting answers in non-WEIRD responses, such as people responding "yes" to being highly organized and later responding "yes" to being careless.”

In addition to erroneous conclusions about cognition and conscientiousness, personality assessments may be wrong about how parties relate to authority, time, uncertainty, and other factors that determine whether negotiations can be successful.

Here’s a link to the article: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-07-standard-personality-weird-cultures.html