The Importance of Psychological Traits: A Cross-Cultural Study

By John E. Williams, Jose L. Saiz, Robert C. Satterwhite

Book Overview

All traits were not created equal. -WORCHEL AND COOPER (1983, p. 180) This book reports the findings from extensive cross-cultural studies of the relative importance ofdifferent psychological traits in 20 countries and the relative favorability of these traits in a subset of 10 countries. While the work is devoted primarily to professionals and advanced students in the social sciences, the relatively nontechnical style - ployed should make the book comprehensible to anyone with a general grasp of the concepts and strategies ofempirical behavioral science. The project grew out of discussions between the first author and third author while the latter was a graduate student at Wake Forest University, U.S.A., in 1990. The third author, a native of Chile, was studying person-descriptive adjectives composing the stereotypes - sociatedwiththe Chilean aboriginal minority knownas Mapuche (Saiz &Williams, 1992). Asweexaminedthe adjectives usedinthisstudy, it was clear that they differed in favorability and also on another dim- sionwhichwe latertermed "psychologicalimportance," i.e., the degree to which adjectives reflected more "central," as opposed to more "- ripheral,"personality characteristics. More important descriptors were those which seemed more informative or diagnostic ofwhat a person "wasreally like"and, hence, might be ofgreater significance in und- standing and predicting an individual's behavior.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1441932984
• ISBN13: 9781441932983
• Release Date: December 2010
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 193 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"