Where are race,ethnicity,and culture in personality research?

Abstract

In recent years personality psychology has re-affirmed its status as what Revelle famously termed “the last refuge of the generalist.” Conceptualizing personality as consisting of traits, characteristic adaptations, and life stories, all of which must be understood in the context of biological and cultural foundations, provides a “big tent” to integrate nearly any aspect of psychology. And yet, this big tent has seemingly had little room for scholarship focused on race, ethnicity, and culture. This paper includes a brief discussion of five reasons why this has been the case: (a) overstating the universality of traits, (b) overstating the genetic basis of personality, (c) hyper-focusing on dispositions, (d) a compromising association with social psychology, and (e) a weak approach to examining group differences. The paper concludes with some ideas for constructing a bigger, more inclusive tent.

Revelle (2007) famously declared that personality psychology is “the last refuge of the generalist.” Personality psychologists like to parrot this claim ¹ , as it helps to succinctly establish the importance of the sub-discipline within the broader field. But how accurate is the claim? What does it mean to be a generalist, and what conditions are necessary for it to be so? In this paper, I take up the issue specifically with respect to the role of race, ethnicity, and culture. I first make some comments on the history and current state of personality research, mostly to set up the second section, focused on reasons and solutions for the absence of race, ethnicity, and culture in the field.

Fitting with the Insights and Ideas format, in which papers are to be “speculative” and “cut to the chase,” I do not provide an extensive review of past theory and research. Moreover, at times I will make broad, seemingly generalized claims. Such claims are for rhetorical purposes only and are not to be taken as absolute claims. What I am speaking to in this paper is not the literal presence of certain types of research, but the general tenor and approach of mainstream personality research, as I see it, which makes me ask the question, where are race, ethnicity, and culture in personality psychology?

Some brief comments on the history and current state of personality research

The title of this paper is a play on Carlson’s (1971) classic article, “Where is the person in personality research?” ² Since Carlson’s admonishment, the field has done a better job including the person, particularly with the emergence of narrative identity research (Dunlop et al., 2016), within-person variability (Fleeson & Jayawickreme, 2015), and idiographic approaches (Beck & Jackson, 2020). Collectively, these efforts re-capture some of the imagination and excitement around personality that were present in the early days of the field.

What accounts for this movement? One possibility is that it was encouraged by the near-extinction of personality research in the wake of the so-called “person by situation debate” (see Funder, 2006). When personality research was gasping for air, it was in its best interest to be welcoming to different approaches and conceptualizations—to make room for all comers—as increasing the number of scholars identifying with personality would help keep it alive. Accordingly, rather than narrow the definition of personality, under severe threat the field broadened the definition—or more accurately it worked to keep the definition broad.

This comment may be surprising to some readers. Personality research is often thought of in terms of traits, and even more narrowly in terms of the Big Five traits (Rauthmann, 2023). This seems to be especially the case for researchers outside of personality psychology, but even those within it will commonly equate personality with traits. This persistent problem notwithstanding, personality researchers have been clear in their theoretical work that personality is more than traits.

One clear example is McAdams and Pals (2006), who advanced a useful organizational system in which personality can be organized into three levels: Level 1 Traits, which refer to relatively stable variations in individual differences; Level 2 Characteristic adaptations, which are contextualized patterns of responses to individual life circumstances that DeYoung (2015) further clarified can be thought of as consisting of goals, interpretations, and strategies; and Level 3, Integrative life narratives, or the stories that people tell about their personal past to make meaning and develop a sense of identity. Importantly, all three levels are situated within biological and cultural contexts, with traits being more proximal to biological foundations, integrative life narratives more proximal to culture, and characteristic adaptations sandwiched in between (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Visual representation of the McAdams and Pals (2006) organizational system for personality, showing that traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life narratives constitute the three levels of personality that exist within biological and cultural contexts. Proximity of the objects corresponds to greater connections between and among them.

This “big tent” approach to personality certainly helps communicate its broad relevance for psychological science and how different components are related. Nevertheless, it is relatively rare to see empirical research that integrates across the different levels. The connections you do see are largely within proximal levels on the biological side of the framework (e.g., behavior genetics and personality neuroscience focus heavily on traits, and to lesser extent characteristic adaptations). But what about the cultural side of the model? Where are race, ethnicity, and culture in all of this? If personality is the last refuge of the generalist, how has cultural psychology not been well-integrated into the field?

The place of race, ethnicity, and culture in personality research

Race, ethnicity, and culture are conceptually distinct concepts that do not have universally shared meaning, especially among those who do not actively engage with the topics. Nevertheless, psychological researchers have coalesced around the following definitions (see Arshad & Chung, 2022; Syed & Kathawalla, 2018): culture is a shared system of meaning transmitted over space and time; ethnicity is a group with some degree of shared beliefs, practices, behaviors, language, and national/regional heritage; and race is a socially constructed system of power and privilege that creates socially-defined and hierarchically-arranged groups. All three are often closely connected and difficult to clearly separate, especially race and ethnicity, which have some functional overlap and are often used interchangeably. The arguments in this essay are mostly focused on race and ethnicity, but also pertain to an understanding of race/ethnicity as inextricably connected to culture.

To understand in just what way race, ethnicity, and culture are lacking in personality research, we must first understand some of the major frameworks for studying diversity in psychology. Shweder (2000) draws an important, yet seldom appreciated, contrast between cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology. Cross-cultural psychology focuses on similarities and differences in psychological phenomena through a comparison of cultural (usually national) groups. The ultimate goal is to “peel the onion” of cultural to understand the universal core (Segall et al., 1998), and thus cross-cultural psychology is an extension of mainstream, universalist psychology.

In contrast, cultural psychology focuses on the local meaning of psychological phenomena, and how variations in mentalities around the world are associated with variations in psychological experience. Cultural psychology does not reject the possibility of universals, emphasizing that whereas some psychological processes are likely universal, their contents (i.e., manifestations) are not (Shweder, 2000).

Neither cross-cultural psychology nor cultural psychology capture what constitutes ethnic minority psychology or multicultural psychology, which focus on the meaning and experience of being a racial/ethnic minority within a specific national context (Hall et al., 2016). Accordingly, ethnic minority psychology tends to have a stronger focus on structural contexts, seeking to understand how power, oppression, and privilege contour psychological phenomena. This is the component that is generally lacking in cross-cultural psychology and most forms of cultural psychology. Whereas cross-cultural and cultural psychology have been conducted by researchers around the world, ethnic minority psychology has focused heavily on the U.S. context, but has also been adopted in Canada and many European countries (e.g., Juang et al., 2023).

Major review articles on personality and culture have highlighted the many advances in the area (Cheung et al., 2011; Lu et al., 2023). These have included cross-cultural work, especially with respect to testing the generality of trait structures across national contexts, as well as cultural approaches that focus on inductive and indigenous conceptualizations of personality. There are also some examples of bringing the two approaches together, bridging the interests of universalism and cultural specificity, such as with the South African Personality Inventory (Hill et al., 2013). Additionally, the Lu et al. (2023) review in particular brought attention to cultural personality research that is not easily categorized, such as integrations with geographic, ecological, and genetic levels of analysis.

And yet, these reviews bring what is lacking in personality research into stark relief. First, as usual, when they say “personality” they mean “traits.” More germane to the present discussion, however, is that there is a complete lack of engagement with race/ethnicity and how they may be relevant for personality research (but see Mendoza-Denton & Worrell, 2019). Indeed, personality research has been generally open to cultural and national variations in trait patterns, but much less open to examining the racial/ethnic context of personality, especially with respect to structural systems of power, oppression, and privilege (Arshad & Chung, 2022). Instead, what we largely have is a cross-cultural psychology of traits of the privileged. That does not seem like an ideal state for the last refuge of the generalist.

Some reasons for the lack of race, ethnicity, and culture in personality research

But why are we in this state? There is a thriving field of ethnic minority psychology, especially within developmental psychology, that is firmly engaging with personality at level 2, characteristic adaptations, examining constructs such as identity, agency, resilience, empowerment, some of which is actually measured in rather trait-like ways. These folks are doing personality psychology, but very few—if any—would identify it as such. Why? I think there are several reasons, here I suggest five:

Personality researchers are bullish on the universalism of trait structures

Despite extensive investigation into personality traits across cultures, some of which highlights substantial variation, it is not uncommon to see claims about the universality, or at least strong generalizability, of trait structures such as the Big Five (Thalmayer et al., 2022). Even if we constrain the generalizability space to the White-dominant societies that are often studied, has there really been sufficient tests of generalizability? There are few quality papers directly comparing the Big Five across different racial/ethnic groups. Interestingly, personality trait researchers will assert the Big Five is generalizable, and ethnic minority researchers will assert it is not, but both of these assertions are absent strong data.

Personality researchers are bullish on the universalism of genetics

Perhaps this one is due to our old friend “physics envy,” but the role of genetic variation for personality is widely overstated. There is certainly ample evidence among limited populations for the heritability of personality traits, but because so many treat traits as equivalent to personality this set of findings gets extrapolated to ample evidence for the heritability of personality (Nguyen et al., 2021). Of course, ethnic minority psychologists have good reasons to be skeptical of shaky claims of the genetic bases of psychological phenomena (see Syed & Kathawalla, 2018 for a discussion).

Personality research is overly dispositional

This is almost a tautological statement, as personality is often literally defined as dispositions. However, just because personality is about dispositions does not mean that personality research needs to be overly dispositional. I mentioned earlier that ethnic minority psychologists, especially developmentalists, are already doing personality research. But they are also doing more. They are including ideas and constructs that recognize the broader structural realities of minority youth, such as discrimination, cultural socializations, educational opportunity, segregation, and so on (see Neblett et al., 2012). High profile ideas rooted in personality psychology, such as grit—but even the more general form of conscientiousness—are embedded within the individualist, endless opportunity ethos of the U.S. context (manifestations of the American Dream master narrative; see Syed et al., 2018).

Personality research is compromised by its association with social psychology

This point is directly related to my previous. To the extent that the dispositionally-focused personality attends to the social context, it does so in alignment with its frenemy social psychology. Social psychology of course focuses on context, but it focuses on the micro-context, the situation. The complicated history between personality and social psychology might have left personality psychologists thinking that issues pertaining to race/ethnicity were not so much a part of the “person” as they were a part of the “context,” and thus not their primary concern. Generally speaking, neither social nor personality psychology have engaged deeply with the structural contexts that contour opportunity (Arshad & Chung, 2022; Cortina et al., 2012; Oishi et al., 2009), which tends to be more of a focus of ethnic minority psychology. Thus, when thinking about context, personality turns to its proximal conceptualization of context, and not to a conceptualization that would be of interest to most researchers attending to race/ethnicity. Rather than aligning with social psychology, I agree strongly with Smith (2005) that personality has a more natural and potentially productive integration with developmental psychology, which is well integrated with ethnic minority psychology.

Personality research is not well-equipped to study group variation

Research on personality traits tends to focus on patterns of individual differences, but less so on how those patterns vary by groups. Our neighbor social psychology of course studies groups, but more in terms of group relations and dynamics, and not so much on group differences. For a field that is otherwise methodologically sophisticated, the study of group variation is still handled in just about the weakest way possible. Let me illustrate.

The dominant approach to culture in personality and social psychology is Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) independent versus interdependent selves. Matsumoto (1999) evaluated the claims made in Markus and Kitayama (1991), distilling the model as essentially arguing that cultural self-construals mediated the associations between cultural variations and psychological outcomes (Figure 2(a)). As Matsumoto so astutely argued, the authors made a compelling case for the theory, drawing from disparate literature in social, personality, and cognitive psychology. They convinced people then, and they continue to convince people today. And yet, remarkably, they did not provide a single piece of evidence that supported their asserted model. Rather than the studies testing cultural processes as mediating cultural differences, all of the evidence simply consisted of cross-national differences in psychological processes (Figure 2(b)). Cultural processes were not measured. Self-construals were not measured. Nations were simply compared, and conclusions were drawn. Sadly, we could change the date on Matsumoto from 1999 to 2022. Nothing has much changed with this supposed gold standard line of cultural personality research (e.g., Lee & Ashton, 2020).

Figure 2.

Model (a) illustrates the theoretical argument made by Markus and Kitayama (1991), that variations in self-construals explain the link between variations in cultural processes and personality. Model (b) illustrates the evidence provided in support of that theoretical argument, which consists of observed national differences in personality. This figure is slightly modified from Matsumoto (1999).

Improving the study of race, ethnicity, and culture in personality research

My brief arguments in this essay are not meant to represent the literal state of all available theory and research on race, ethnicity, and culture in personality research. Rather, they are to help raise awareness around what is lacking in the mainstream of the field, and to ultimately motivate change. A recent article by Arshad and Chung (2022) covers similar ground in much more depth, and includes solid recommendations on how to move forward. I urge readers to consult that article, and here I close this essay with one integrated example of how changing our mindsets about how we approach race, ethnicity, and culture can help broaden and deepen the field.

Taking an interest in race/ethnicity in psychology often, but not always, leads to making comparisons across groups. Ethnic minority psychologists tend to be deeply skeptical of group comparative work (a) in general, and (b) that does not include an analysis of the putative mechanisms that account for the differences. Why? Because of the long history of psychology interpreting such differences from a deficit perspective, in which the dominant White group is held as the standard, and the minority groups represent deviations from that standard. Thus, it is important for folks engaging with this work to think about the reasons for why group differences might be observed (see Syed, 2020). Observed differences in psychological phenomena are never because of individuals’ race/ethnicity, which have no causal power of their own, but because of some psychological variation that co-occurs with the groups. If the assertion is that traits are culturally expressed, and thus might vary due to the cultural differences, there needs to be some measure of how people align with those cultural expressions. Cultural expressions are individual differences, not inherent to groups. Taking this issue seriously is one of the major ways to move forward with a meaningful connection between personality and ethnic minority psychology.

Importantly, this solution is evident in the McAdams and Pals (2006) conceptualization of personality. Existing studies of group differences, many of which take the Markus and Kitayama (1991) approach, are attempting to connect culture to traits. However, if you recall my argument about the proximal nature of the different levels of personality, it may just be impossible to gain useful insights about cultural variations in traits without passing through the levels of characteristic adaptations and/or life stories (Figure 3). That is, traits are too distal from cultural contexts to be able to understand much about the cultural nature of traits without consideration of the ways in which individuals engage with their cultures (represented by characteristic adaptations and life stories).

Figure 3.

Panel (a) illustrates the typical approach to culture and personality, in which groups are compared on traits. Panel (b) illustrates a potentially more informative approach by understanding cultural variations in traits via the more proximal levels of integrative life narratives and characteristic adaptations. This figure shows the same two approaches as illustrated in Figure 2.

Those levels are the bread and butter of ethnic minority psychology, so serious engagement with them will lead towards a greater connection between these areas. And greater connection is needed, not only to live up to Revelle’s claim that personality is the last refuge of the generalist, but also to address Carlson’s long-ago question of where the person is in personality research. Personality research must consider all aspects of personality among all persons within the contexts of how their lives are lived.

Key insights

Race/ethnicity/culture are fundamental for understanding individual differences

Personality research has largely not integrated scholarship on race/ethnicity/culture

Personality research must move beyond a hyper-focus on traits to integrate race/ethnicity/culture

Relevance statement

Psychological researchers have increasingly recognized that a science that is based on a small segment of the human population is not actually a proper science at all. Whereas some sub-fields (e.g., developmental psychology, counseling psychology) have made progress in not only recognizing the importance of this issue, but taking decisive actions to remedy it, others have made less progress. This paper focuses specifically on personality psychology, arguing that it is well-suited to better integrate issues of race/ethnicity in particular, but that current practices inhibit this integration. The paper is relevant for all personality researchers to think more deeply about how they can diversify their work.