Mean Profiles of the NEO Personality Inventory

Abstract

The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and its latest version, the NEO-PI-3, were designed to measure 30 distinctive personality traits, which are grouped into Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness domains. The mean self-rated NEO-PI-R scores for 30 subscales have been reported for 36 countries or cultures in 2002. As a follow-up, this study reports the mean scores of the NEO-PI-R/3 for 71,870 participants from 76 samples and 62 different countries or cultures and 37 different languages. Mean differences in personality traits across countries and cultures were about 8.5 times smaller than differences between any two individuals randomly selected from these samples. Nevertheless, a multidimensional scaling of similarities and differences in the mean profile shape showed a clear clustering into distinctive groups of countries or cultures. This study provides further evidence that country/culture mean scores in personality are replicable and can provide reliable information about personality dispositions.