Culture and personality

[differenceblog]

Last May ( 5/30/07), we discussed the "International Sexuality Description Project" (ISDP) - a cross-cultural psychological inventory of over 16,000 participants (largely college students). Of course, with a data set that large, it would be surprising if only one paper resulted from it. For the rest of this week, we'll look at other studies

Comments

[elizilla]

Maybe gender differences in personality would be attenuated in less fortunate social and economic conditions, because claiming that you can't do X, or that you need Y, because of your gender, is a luxury that the less fortunate do not have? When you're struggling like hell to survive, you do what you have to do, and I would think this would have an impact on your personality.

[differenceblog]

Yeah, I can see that a bit as well, but then I'd expect to see a "crest" in the middle of the development curve - somewhere where the basic survival needs are met, but the societal pressures are still sort of high.

[furikku]

I was going to post something like this; I think there's also more of an opportunity for the wealthier populations to segregate along sex/gender lines in activities, at least if they're similar to what I've seen in the US.

Dan, good luck with your operation!

[differenceblog]

Dan, good luck with your operation!

Thanks.

[hrafn]

Good luck with surgery! I hope you have a speedy recovery.

[kementari2]

I'm not sure how they defined egalitarianism in the study, but here's another explanation: maybe people want to distinguish themselves one way or another as part of one or more crowds but different from other crowds. In an egalitarian society where it's unlikely, unpopular, or impractical to cultivate obvious traits of your membership in a particular economic, ethnic, religious, or regional group, what's left is gender.

[differenceblog]

sort of a human-scale two-party system?