Person-Culture Personality Fit: Dispositional Traits and Cultural Context Explain Country-Level Personality Profile Conformity

Abstract

In general, people are influenced by the standards set forth by groups of others; however, the levels of such conformity vary between people and across cultures. Here, we investigated factors related to country-level personality profile conformity (i.e., person-culture personality fit) across ∼5.9 million participants, residing in 57 different countries. We examined how each of the Big Five personality traits and cultural tightness are associated with variation in person-culture personality fit. We found that scoring higher in Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and residing in a tight cultural context explains increased personality profile conformity, while scoring higher in Openness and Neuroticism and residing in a loose cultural context explains lower personality profile conformity. Furthermore, we found that Openness and Extraversion interact with cultural context to predict levels of personality profile conformity. These findings reveal that both dispositional and cultural factors correspond to the tendency to conform to country-level norms.