Giving Entire Cultures a Personality Test

                                            Summary

This report presents the idea of giving entire cultures a personality test.  

There are some stereotypes such as Americans are extraverted, German and Japanese people are conscientious and organized and British people are unemotional. To check up correctness of these stereotypes was created a personality test by a large group of researchers called NEO Personality Inventory. The researcher’s personality consisted of a short questionnaire which could indicate the characteristics of a member of their culture. Furthermore, they administered a measure of perceptions of national character; it is a common belief about people from different cultures.  In fact there are also some results of interviews; Canadians see themselves as highly agreeable, Americans see themselves as extraverted, and on the other hand, not particularly agreeable. These facts appear to be the major cause that the researchers concluded that national character is not a generalization about the real personality characteristics of a culture’s members.

The report finds that national character shows how people see themselves in a culture, rather than how they actually are.