How Accurate Are National Stereotypes?

Many people hold beliefs about the typical traits—stereotypes—of people from different cultures. The Canadians are polite. The French are rude. The Italians are passionate. The Japanese are punctual.

Such stereotypes matter. Often, we ascribe stereotypic traits to people about whom we don't know much, other than their nationality, and make real-life decisions based on these ascribed traits. For example, some may avoid traveling to a country where we think people are rude. Some may not buy a product made in a country where people are stereotypically not the most detail-oriented. The stereotypes may even fuel serious conflicts.

But how accurate are such stereotypes? Can we really say something about a person's psychological traits based on their nationality?

Personality science can help

Many national stereotypes focus on one or two specific traits, like being loud, or punctual, or fashionable. But people are more than one or two traits. Even if you do have accurate information that someone is loud, punctual, or fashionable, how much does that really tell you about them? Not much.

Instead, people are better described using a collection of many traits. This is where personality trait science comes in, with its trait models that summarize similarities and differences among people as comprehensively as possible. The Big Five personality traits, for example, provide such a model.

This puts personality science in a good position to ask how different people from different cultures are and how accurate our stereotypes are about these differences. Here's what has been done:

• Personality scientists have asked people from dozens of countries to complete the same personality questionnaire about themselves or someone they know well and who is also from their country. This has allowed them to measure national differences in the personality traits of actual people.
• The scientists have also asked the people to use the same questionnaire to describe their views of a typical representative of their own nation or a typical representative of another nationality. This has allowed scientists to measure national personality stereotypes.
• Since the personality traits of actual people and the national stereotypes are described with the same collection of personality traits, national differences in them can be directly compared. For example, are those traits on which a nation scores especially highly, according to the stereotype, the same traits on which the actual representatives of this nation tend to score highly?

National stereotypes don't describe actual people

When nations are ranked in traits of real people on the one hand and stereotypically ascribed traits on the other hand, the two rankings are almost always different.

The most extensive study to date was based on comparing 49 countries in the Big Five personality traits of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and a range of more specific traits (called facets) making up each of the Big Five. There was no correspondence between where the nations stood in terms of stereotypes and actual people's personality traits.

For example, according to the stereotypes, the Japanese were among the most neurotic, introverted, and closed-to-experiences people in the world. The actual Japanese, however, scored around the world average in all of these traits. Stereotypically, Canadians were among the most agreeable, and U.S. citizens were among the least agreeable people in the world. But the average agreeableness scores of actual people from both countries were similarly close to the world average. And, contrary to the stereotype, the average conscientiousness of actual Japanese people was among the lowest in the world. The actual responses of the French were quite a bit more agreeable than the stereotype would have them.

Focusing on each nation separately, researchers then compared their stereotypic trait profiles—traits in which the nation was particularly high and particularly low—with the trait profiles of actual people. Again, there was almost no correspondence at all, except for a couple of nations.

By and large, other studies have replicated these findings. Sometimes, for some nations, there is a modest overlap between the stereotypes and traits of real people. Still, there is rarely any reason to call national personality stereotypes accurate.

Why are our intuitions about nations' typical personality traits so inaccurate?

For the most part, the answer is very simple: people from different countries are simply not that different in most traits. Within any given country, people vary tremendously in their personality trait scores, but the average people from different countries are quite similar. Technically speaking, personality trait scores' variability within countries is typically around ten times larger than their differences between countries.

Yes, complicated statistical models can pick up subtle patterns in the small differences in the average trait scores of the members of different nations. For example, this allows researchers to fairly accurately predict which country people are from, based on their personality trait ratings. Also, this allows researchers to draw maps that put, personality-wise, more similar nations closer and, personality-wise, more different nations further apart. But the national differences in individual traits are far too small for the naked eye.

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Several nations ranked according to the correlations of their personality trait profiles to the trait profile of a typical British. Perhaps not surprisingly, the trait profile of an average Brit is most similar to the trait profile of an average Irish.
https://www.ejp-blog.com/blog/2017/9/8/a-backdrop-to-the-brexit-guest-p…

Source: René Mõttus.

Another likely reason that national personality stereotypes are inaccurate is that most of us do not know people from other countries well enough to reliably pick up the subtle psychological differences between them. For comparison, gender and age differences in personality traits are also subtle, but people have developed more accurate—although often exaggerated—stereotypes about these.

Conclusion

It is almost impossible to make even remotely accurate predictions about someone's personality traits based on their nationality unless you happen to be a complicated computer algorithm. This is mostly because national differences in the personality traits of actual people are tiny and subtle.

So, national stereotypes may be fun, but they are just that—folklore to amuse us. We should not trust them nor rely on them for any real-life decisions. For the most part, psychological traits are distributed similarly throughout the world.