EXTENDED PDF FORMAT SPONSORED BY Measuring Cytokines? Don't Sacrifice on Quality New ELISA Solutions >Learn More KD www.rndsystems.com National Character Does Not Reflect Mean Personality Trait Levels in 49 Cultures A. Terracciano et al. Science 310, 96 (2005); DOI: 10.1126/science.1117199 This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. If you wish to distribute this article to others, you can order high-quality copies for your colleagues, clients, or customers by clicking here. Permission to republish or repurpose articles or portions of articles can be obtained by o following the guidelines here. - The following resources related to this article are available online at § www.sciencemag.org (this information is current as of January 9, 2014 ): c Updated information and services, including high-resolution figures, can be found in the online o version of this article at: E? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5745/96 .full, html °. 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Copyright 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title Science is a registered trademark of AAAS. Reports National Character Does Not Reflect Mean Personality Trait Levels in 49 Cultures A. Terracciano,1* A. M. Abdel-Khalek,2 N. Adam,3 L. Adamovova,4 C.-k. Ahn,5 H.-n. Ahn,6 B. M. Alansari,2 L. Alcalay,7 J. Allik,8 A. Angleitner,9 M. D. Avia,10 L. E. Ayearst,11 C. Barbaranelli,12 A. Beer,13 M. A. Borg-Cunen,14 D. Bratko,15 M. Brunner-Sciarra,16 L. Budzinski,17 N. Camart,18 D. Dahourou,19 F. De Fruyt20 M. P. de Lima,21 G. E. H. del Pilar,22 E. Diener,23 R. Falzon,14 K. Fernando,24 E. Fickova,4 R. Fischer,25 C. Flores-Mendoza,26 M. A. Ghayur,27t S. Gulgoz,28 B. Hagberg,29 J. Halberstadt,24 M. S. Halim,30 M. Hrebickova,31 J. Humrichouse,13 H. H. Jensen,32 D. D. Jocic,33 F. H. Jonsson,34 B. Khoury,35 W. Klinkosz,36 G. Knezevic,37 M. A. Lauri,14 N. Leibovich,38 T. A. Martin,39 I. Marusic,15 K. A. Mastor,40 D. Matsumoto,41 M. McRorie,42 B. Meshcheriakov,43 E. L. Mortensen,32 M. Munyae,44 J. Nagy,3 K. Nakazato,45 F. Nansubuga,46 S. Oishi,47 A. O. Ojedokun,48 F. Ostendorf,9 D. L. Paulhus,49 S. Pelevin,43 J.-M. Petot,18 N. Podobnik,50 J. L. Porrata,51 V. S. Pramila,52 G. Prentice,42 A. Realo,8 N. Reategui,16 J.-P. Rolland,53 J. Rossier,54 W. Ruch,55 V. S. Rus,56 M. L. Sanchez-Bernardos,10 V. Schmidt,38 S. Sciculna-Calleja,14 A. Sekowski,36 J. Shakespeare-Finch,57| Y. Shimonaka,58 F. Simonetti,7 T. Sineshaw,59 J. Siuta,60 P. B. Smith,61 P. D. Trapnell,62 K. K. Trobst,11 L. Wang,63 M. Yik,64 A. Zupancic,65 R. R. McCrae1* Most people hold beliefs about personality characteristics typical of members of their own and others' cultures. These perceptions of national character may be generalizations from personal experience, stereotypes with a "kernel of truth," or inaccurate stereotypes. We obtained national character ratings of 3989 people from 49 cultures and compared them with the average personality scores of culture members assessed by observer ratings and self-reports. National character ratings were reliable but did not converge with assessed traits. Perceptions of national character thus appear to be unfounded stereotypes that may serve the function of maintaining a national identity. Beliefs about distinctive personality characteristics common to members of a culture are referred to as national character (1) or national stereotypes (2-4). National stereotypes include beliefs about social, physical, and mental characteristics, but the present article focuses on personality traits. Several factors are thought to influence these beliefs. They may be generalizations based on observations of the personality traits of individual culture members. They may be inferences based on the national ethos, as revealed in socioeconomic conditions, history, customs, myths, legends, and values. They may be shaped by comparisons or contrasts with geographically close or competing cultures. Stereotypes are oversimplified judgments, but if they have some "kernel of truth" (5), national character should reflect the average emotional, interpersonal, experiential, attitudinal, and motivational styles of members of the culture. There have been few attempts to examine the accuracy of national stereotypes (3, 5-7), perhaps because researchers lacked appropriate criteria. However, recent advances in personality psychology and cross-cultural research make it possible to compare perceived national character with aggregate personality data (that is, the means of a sample of assessments of individuals) across a wide range of cultures. National character may be a social construction, but personality traits are rooted in biology. Most personality psychologists today agree that the dimensions of the five-factor model (FFM) of personality—neuroticism versus emotional stability, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—account for the covariation of most personality traits (8), and behavioral genetics studies (9) have shown that traits from all five factors are strongly heritable. As products (in part) of the human genome, traits are universal: Cross-cultural research suggests that the structure and development of personality traits is very similar in nations as dissimilar as India, Argentina, and Burkina Faso (10). In every culture examined, the five factors are hierarchically related to lower order traits or facets. For example, the extraversion factor in the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) (11) is defined by warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking, and positive emotions facets. Personality traits can be assessed with standardized instruments such as the NEO-PI-R, using either self-reports or observer ratings from knowledgeable informants. The reliability and validity of individual assessments made with the NEO-PI-R are well established (10, 11). Recent cross-cultural data also indicate that aggregate (or mean) NEO-PI-R scores can be validly used to describe cultures as a whole. In a study of self-report data from 36 cultures, culture-level scores were generaliz-able across age groups and gender, and aggregate scores showed meaningful patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with other culture-level variables such as individualism-collectivism (12). Geographically and historically related cultures (such as Germany and Austria or the United States and Canada) showed similar personality profiles (13). Most of these findings were replicated in a subsequent study using observer ratings from 51 cultures (10, 14), and aggregate self-reports were significantly correlated with aggregate observer ratings for most of the 30 NEO-PI-R facets. Assessed aggregate personality scores from these two studies can thus be used in a multimethod evaluation of the accuracy of perceptions of national character. There is a substantial literature on the evaluation of the accuracy of stereotypes (3), showing that they may or may not reflect reality. For example, gender stereotypes depicting women as warm and men as assertive are widely held around the world (15). Cross-cultural studies using both self-reports and observer ratings have shown that women in fact score higher on measures of warmth, whereas men score higher on measures of assertiveness (10, 16). Assessed gender differences are small but are largely consistent with gender stereotypes (17, 18), so those views appear to have a basis in the characteristics of individuals. The available literature provides less support for the accuracy of beliefs about national character. The perceptions of a panel of experts in cross-cultural psychology did not match beyond chance the assessed characteristics in a sample of 26 cultures (19). Church and Katigbak (20) identified raters who had lived in both the United States and the Philippines and asked them to compare the typical American with the typical Filipino on traits that paralleled the 30 NEO-PI-R facets. There was 96 7 OCTOBER 2005 VOL 310 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Reports considerable consensus among the judges, but their judgments did not correspond to differences observed when mean American self-reports were compared to mean Filipino self-reports. Another study using the NEO-PI-R found no support for popular stereotypes of northern and southern Italians (21). Here, we examine whether national character, as described by culture members themselves (the in-group), are consistent with aggregate personality data. Aggregate scores from self-report and observer ratings on the NEO-PI-R provide the criteria, but measurement of perceived national character requires a new instrument. We designed a short questionnaire, the National Character Survey (NCS), to describe the typical member of a culture (22). The NCS consists of 30 bipolar scales with two or three adjectives or phrases at each pole of the scale. For example, the first item asks how likely it is that the typical member of a culture is anxious, nervous, and worrying versus at ease, calm, and relaxed. Each five-point scale taps one of the 30 facets assessed by the NEO-PI-R, with six items for each of the five major dimensions of personality traits. Internal consistency and factor analysis of the NCS items (22) indicate 1National Institute on Aging, NIH, DHHS, Gerontology Research Center, 5600 Nathan Shock Drive, Baltimore, MD 21224, USA. department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kuwait, Post Office Box 68168, 71962, Kaifan, Kuwait. 3Faculty of Education and Psychology, Lóránd Eótvós University, 1075 Budapest, Kazinczy u. 23-25, Hungary, institute of Experimental Psychology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dubravska cesta 9, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, 813 64. department of Education, Pusan National University, 30 Jangjeon-dong, Geumjeong-gu, Busan 609-735, Republic of Korea, department of Psychology, Pusan National University, 30 Jangjeon-dong, Geumjeong-gu, Busan 609-735, Republic of Korea. 7Escuela de Psi-cologia, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Vicuna Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile, department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Tiigi 78, Tartu, Estonia, 50410. dniversity of Bielefeld, Department of Psychology, Post Office Box 100131, Bielefeld, Germany, D-33501. 10Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad Com-plutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. ^Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3. "Department of Psychology, University of Rome, La Sapienza, Via Dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome, Italy. "Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, E11 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242-1407, USA. ^Department of Psychology, University of Malta, Msida MSD 06 Malta. 15Odsjek za Psihologiju, Filozofski Fakultet u Zagrebu, I. Lucica 3, Zagreb, Croatia, 10000. 16Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Av. Armendáriz 497 Miraflores, Lima, Peru. "Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC, 3010, Australia. 18Laboratoire de Psychologie Clinique des Faits Culturels, Universitě de Paris-X, 200, Avenue de la Republique, Nanterre, France, 92001. "Department of Psychology, University of Ouagadougou, 03 B.P. 7021 Ouagadougou 03, Burkina Faso. ^Department of Psychology, H. Dunantlaan, 2, Ghent, Belgium, B-9000. 21Faculdade de Psicologia, Ciencias da Educacao, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal. ^Department of Psychology, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, 1101, Philippines. "Department of Psychology, University of that the scales have acceptable psychometric properties and successfully define the dimensions of the FFM. To the extent that the FFM is a comprehensive model of personality, the NCS should capture the essential features of national character. Data were gathered from 49 cultures or subcultures from six continents, using translations into 27 languages from Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic, Malayo-Polynesian, and Altaic families. Most cultures corresponded to nations; however, where subcultures could be identified on the basis of history (e.g., England versus Northern Ireland) or language (e.g., French- versus German-speaking Switzerland), they were treated as separate samples. In each sample, we asked college students to complete the NCS to describe the typical member of their culture or subculture and then, as a common basis of comparison, the typical American. Analyses of the NCS data in the full sample (N = 3989) and in selected subsamples supported the reliability, generalizability, and validity of the NCS as a measure of perceived national character (22). Interjudge reliability between single raters showed there is only modest agreement between individual judg- lllinois, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. ^Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Post Office Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. "School of Psychology, Post Office Box 600, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. 26U Federal de Minas Gerais, Dept. de Psicologia, Sala 4042, Av. Antonio Carlos 6627, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 27Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco. 28Koc University, Sariyer 80910, Istanbul, Turkey. 29Unit of Gerontology and Care for the Elderly, Lund University, Box 187, S-222 20 Lund, Sweden. 30Faculty of Psychology, Atma Jaya Indonesia Catholic University, JL Jenderal Sudirman kav-51, Jakarta Selatan-12930, Indonesia. 31Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Vevri 97, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic 'department of Health Psychology, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 3, Copenhagen N, Denmark, DK-2200. "institute for Psychiatry, Pasterova 2, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. 34Uni-versity of Iceland, Faculty of Social Science, Oddi, Sturlugata, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland. "Department of Psychiatry, American University of Beirut Medical Center, Post Office Box 11-0236, Riad El-Solh, Beirut 1107 2020 Lebanon. "Catholic University of Lublin, Department of Psychology, A1, Raclawickie 14, Lublin 20-950 Poland. "Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Cika Ljubina 18-20, 11000 Belgrade, Yugoslavia. "Faculty of Psychology, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. "Department of Psychology, Susquehanna University, 514 University Avenue, Selinsgrove, PA 17870, USA. 40Center for General Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia. ^Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA. 42School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK. 43Department of Psychology, International University Dubna, 19, Universitetskaya str., Dubna, Moscow area, Russia, 141980. 44Center for Continuing Education, University of Botswana, Private Bag UB 0022, Gaborone, Botswana. ^Department of Psychology, Iwate Prefectural University, 152-52 Sugo, Taki-zawa, Iwate, 020-0193 Japan. ^Department of Organizational Psychology, Makerere University, Post ments of national character, with coefficients ranging from 0.09 to 0.30 (median, 0.17). This is roughly half the size of typical agreement between two judges on a single person they both know well (23). However, by aggregating the judgments of an average of 81 raters per culture, highly reliable means were obtained, with reliability coefficients ranging from 0.96 to 0.97 for the five factors, and from 0.89 to 0.97 (median, 0.94) for the 30 facets. These aggregate values correspond to the shared portion of individuals' perceptions. Men and women provided essentially the same profile of the typical member of their culture: When mean scores for female subsamples were correlated with mean scores for male subsamples matched on culture, correlations for the five factors ranged from 0.80 to 0.90 (N= 49; all Ps < 0.001). Additional analyses comparing NCS profiles across groups used T scores (M = 50, SD =10) based on the grand means and standard deviations across all raters and samples for the 30 NCS items. Profile agreement is calculated as the intraclass correlation (ICC) across the 30 facets, using the double-entry method (24). Intraclass correlations are similar to Pearson correlations, but are sensitive to both Office Box 7062, Kampala, Uganda. 'Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Post Office Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904-^400, USA. ^Department of Psychology, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. ^Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4. 50Psy-chiatric Hospital of Idrija, Pot Sv. Antona 49 Idrija, 5280 Slovenia. 51Escuela Graduada de Administracion Publica, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. "Department of Psychology, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam 530 003, Andhra Pradesh, India. "Universitě Paris 10, STAPS Dept., 200 Avenue de la Republique, Nanterre, France, 92001. institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, BFSH 2 Dorigny, Lausanne, Switzerland, CH-1015. "Psychologisches Institut, Zúrichbergstrasse 43,8044 Zurich, Switzerland. 56Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. "School of Psychology and Counselling, Queensland University of Technology. "Department of Psychology, Bunkyo Gakuin University, 1196, Kamekubo, Oi-machi, Iruma-gun, Saitama, 356-8533, Japan. "Department of Psychology, Ramapo College of New Jersey, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah, NJ 07430, USA. 60lnstitute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. ^Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. "Department of Psychology, The University of Winnipeg 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada R3B 2E9. "Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing People's Republic of China. 64Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. "Ministry for Health, Štefanova ulica 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: terraccianoa@grc.nia.nih.gov (A.T.); mccraej@ grc.nia.nih.gov (R.R.M.) fPresent address: Department of Psychology, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-4611, USA. {Present address: School of Psychology, University of Tasmania, Locked Bag 1342, Launceston, TAS, 7250 Australia. www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 310 7 OCTOBER 2005 97 Reports the shapes of the profiles and differences in elevation, and are thus an appropriate metric for assessing profile similarity. With 30 profile elements, ICCs above 0.57 are significant at P < 0.001. Several comparisons suggested that NCS means were robust. In Ethiopia and Italy, samples of adults were used as raters in addition to college students and yielded similar profiles (ICCs = 0.62 and 0.90, respectively). In some cultures, student data from multiple sites were available, and intraclass correlations between these different sites ranged from 0.76 to 0.94 (25). This is illustrated for Canada and the United States by the dotted lines in Fig. 1 (26). Mean NCS scores for the 49 cultures are in table SI; the highest and lowest scoring cultures for each factor are listed in Table 1. It is perhaps not surprising that Australians see themselves as extraverts, German Swiss believe they are typically high in conscientiousness, and Canadians describe themselves as agreeable. But many of the other entries are nations with which most readers are not familiar, and it is difficult to judge the plausibility of these ratings. In any case, individual judgments of national character—including the reader's—have low reliability. The data suggest that aggregate values accurately reflect the way in-group members perceive the personality of the typical member of their culture. The primary question this study was designed to address is whether these in-group perceptions of national character accurately reflect aggregate judgments of individual personality traits. A first examination of the data shows one respect in which they are clearly different: There is a much greater range of variation across cultures in perceived traits than in assessed traits. For example, the typical German-speaking Swiss is thought to score 28 T score points higher on conscientiousness than the typical Indonesian, but the largest difference on observer-rated conscientiousness between any two cultures was only 8 T score points. Thus, if national stereotypes are accurate at all, they clearly exaggerate real differences. We first examined agreement of trait profiles within cultures, correlating NCS facet scores with assessed mean facet values from NEO-PI-R observer ratings (N = 11,479) in 47 cultures (10) and self-reports (N = 25,732) in 30 cultures (12, 22). ICCs between NCS and the NEO-PI-R observer rating profiles ranged from -0.57 for England to 0.40 for Poland (median, 0.00), and there was a significant positive correlation in only four cultures (New Zealand, Australia, Poland, and Lebanon). Ex- amples of these findings are shown in Fig. 1. in which the solid lines, representing mean observer-rated NEO-PI-R profiles, deviate markedly from the perceptions of national character, especially with regard to agreeableness facets. ICCs between NCS and mean NEO-PI-R self-report profiles ranged from -0.46 for Russia to 0.46 for Poland (median, -0.02), and only Poland and Japan showed significant positive correlations (table SI). Thus, only for Poland were the observer rating findings replicated. Overall, there is little support for the view that perceptions of national character profiles are accurate in any culture. However, it is possible that agreement exists for some factors. To determine the degree of agreement for each trait, NCS domain and facet scores were correlated with NEO-PI-R observer ratings and self-reports across 47 and 30 cultures, respectively. For the five factors, correlations with observer ratings ranged from -0.23 to 0.13, and those with self-reports ranged from -0.34 to 0.30 (table S2), which indicates that there is no relation between aggregate NEO-PI-R data and the NCS on any of the five major dimensions. (This finding is illustrated in Table 1, where cultures scoring high versus low on the five NCS factors do not differ systematically on mean NEO-PI-R T 60- 55- !50- 45- 55- 2 g5CH I 45- 40- / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /V / Fig. 1. T scores for NCS and NEO-PI-R factor and facet scales. On the left the scores for the five factors are plotted; toward the right are the 30 facets, grouped by the factor they define. Dotted lines show the NCS profile of the typical Canadian (top panel) and American (bottom panel) as perceived by students from three Canadian and four American sites, respectively. High profile similarity can be observed among the Canadian sites (ICCs = 0.89 to 0.92) and among the American sites (ICCs = 0.76 to 0.89), suggesting consensus on national character. Solid lines show mean observer-rated NEO-PI-R profiles. In both Canada (ICC = -0.03) and the United States (ICC = 0.23), in-group perceptions of national character across all sites do not reflect aggregate assessments of individual personality traits. The distinction between national character and mean trait levels can also be seen by comparing top and bottom panels: The NEO-PI-R profiles of the United States and Canada are similar "\ V■ ' Canada T~S? .V...................--NEO-PI-R ■M......•...............NCS: Winnipeg .................................NCS: Toronto ....................... NCS: Vancouver :Al Ji 5 i Hi I i ii il-i % I I i i \ : :|:| j : ; : 0- : : : : : . u.s.a. 'v - ^m~, ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ~ ; ; 7v{V. ,^ ...........ncs: California rm . ■ f......................■ ...........NCS: towa * ■ *......................: .............NCS: Minnesota ............................•-•.......NCS: Illinois ■55 ■40 (ICC = 0.66), whereas there is no agreement between their national character ratings (ICC = -0.53). N, neuroticism; E, extraversion; O, openness to experience; A, agreeableness; C, conscientiousness. 98 7 OCTOBER 2005 VOL 310 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Reports scores.) There were 11 significant correlations at the facet level, 5 of which were negative. The median of the 70 correlations was 0.04. The only replicated effect was a significant negative correlation with openness to feelings: In cultures where people have a sensitive and rich emotional life, they perceive that their typical compatriot is emotionally impoverished. These analyses, too, provide little reason to trust national stereotypes (27). Comparisons across cultures are always challenging, and several factors may have limited the association between NCS and NEO-PTR profiles, including problems in translation, response biases such as acquiescence (a yea-saying tendency) (29), and the unfamiliarity of respondents in some cultures with the use of rating scales (10). Comparisons would have been more direct if the full NEO-PI-R had been used to assess national character. Yet, the mean NCS scores were reliable and generalizable across sites and types of rater and showed the hypothesized factor structure. Future studies might use more representative raters, although student and adult samples gave similar results when both were available. In the case of gender differences, widely held stereotypes are consistent with—although they may exaggerate—assessed personality dif- ferences between men and women (16-18). That kernel-of-truth hypothesis does not appear to apply to national character. Correspondence between perceived national character traits and the average levels of traits of individual members of each culture was found neither within nor across cultures. Perceptions of national character are not generalizations about personality traits based on accumulated observations of the people with whom one lives; instead, they appear to be social constructions that may serve different functions altogether. Correlations of NCS scores with culture-level variables might be informative about these functions. Whatever their origins, stereotypes may be perpetuated by information-processing biases in attention/perception, encoding, and integration of information (2, 30). They become cultural phenomena, transmitted through media, hearsay, education, history, and jokes. However, national character also has a much darker side. When stereotypes of national or ethnic groups are unfavorable, they can lead to prejudice, discrimination, or persecution, of which history and the world today are full of tragic examples. The classic analysis of stereotypes depicted them as the product of authoritarian (31) or prejudiced (32) personalities; more recent approaches have consid- ered them as the result of general cognitive processes (2). Although social scientists have long been skeptical about the accuracy of national stereotypes, the present study offers the best evidence to date that in-group perceptions of national character may be informative about the culture, but they are not descriptive of the people themselves. References and Notes 1. D. Peabody, National Characteristics (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1985). 2. C. N. Macrae, C. Stangor, M. Hewstone, Stereotypes and Stereotyping (Guilford Press, New York, 1996). 3. Y. T. Lee, L. Jussim, C. McCauLey, Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences (American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, 1995). 4. S. Madon et ai, Pers. Soc. Psychol Bull. 27, 996 (2001). 5. J. C. Brigham, Psychol. Bull. 76, 15 (1971). 6. C. McCauley, C. L. Stitt,/ Pers. Soc. Psychol. 36, 929 (1978). 7. C. M. Judd, B. Park, Psychol. Rev. 100, 109 (1993). 8. J. M. Digman, Annu. Rev. Psychol. 41, 417 (1990). 9. T. J. Bouchard, Science 264, 1700 (1994). 10. R. R. McCrae et ai, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 88, 547 (2005). 11. P. T. Costa Jr., R. R. McCrae, Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual (Psychological Assessment Resources, Odessa, FL, 1992). 12. R. R. McCrae, in The Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Cultures, R. R. McCrae, J. Allik, Eds. (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York, 2002), pp. 105-125. 13. J. Allik, R. R. McCrae, / Cross Cult. Psychol. 35, 13 (2004). 14. R. R. McCrae etal.,J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., in press. 15. J. E. Williams, D. E. Best, Measuring Sex Stereotypes: A Thirty Nation Study (Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1982). 16. P. T. Costa Jr., A. Terracciano, R. R. McCrae, / Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81, 322 (2001). 17. C. L. Martin, / Pers. Soc. Psychol. 52, 489 (1987). 18. J. K. Swim, / Pers. Soc. Psychol. 66, 21 (1994). 19. R. R. McCrae, / Pers. 69, 819 (2001). 20. A. T. Church, M. S. Katigbak, in The Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Cultures, R. R. McCrae, J. Allik, Eds. (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 2002), pp. 129-154. 21. A. Terracciano, R. R. McCrae, in 113th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (Washington, DC, 2005). 22. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online. 23. R. R. McCrae etal.J. Res. Pers. 38, 179 (2004). 24. D. Griffin, R. Gonzalez, Psychol. Bull. 118, 430 (1995). 25. By contrast, distinct cultures within countries showed different profiles. In the UK, the profiles of England and Northern Ireland showed no resemblance (ICC = -0.01). Similarly, in the PRC, the profiles of China and Hong Kong showed no resemblance (ICC = -0.25). There is some resemblance between Czech and Slovakian (ICC = 0.43, P < 0.05), and Serbian and Croatian (ICC = 0.43, P < 0.05) profiles; the separation of those nations is relatively recent. 26. Additionally, we compared NCS scores from the Philippines to ratings made by bicultural raters in an earlier study (20). Because Church and Katigbak used comparative judgments, we created new NCS scores by subtracting Filipino ratings of the typical American from Filipino ratings of the typical Filipino. The correlation of these 30 difference scores with the Church and Katigbak ratings was 0.76, P < 0.001. 27. Different standards of evaluation across cultures might have affected the results—that is, raters from some cultures may have been more generous or critical in their ratings than raters from other cultures, distorting the comparison across cultures. On the assumption that such biases would affect ratings both of one's own compatriots and of Americans, we calculated difference scores by Table 1. Cultures scoring highest and lowest on five National Character Survey (NCS) factors, with observer-rated Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) factor mean T scores. Highest NCS scores Lowest NCS scores Culture NEO-PI-R T score Culture NEO-PI-R T score Neuroticism Indonesia 50.0 The Philippines 48.3 Nigeria 47.8 Canada 49.5 Turkey 51.4 New Zealand 47.9 Poland 50.7 Australia 48.6 Japan 50.7 Burkina Faso 53.1 Extraversion Puerto Rico 51.6 Slovenia 49.5 Australia 53.8 Indonesia 45.4 Spain 50.4 French Switzerland 51.0 New Zealand 52.4 Japan 49.4 Serbia 49.3 Estonia 52.1 Openness Russia 49.7 P. R. China 50.1 India 48.8 Estonia 46.8 Nigeria 49.1 Chile 51.8 Kuwait 47.6 Turkey 48.2 Puerto Rico 49.7 Japan 51.2 Agreeableness Burkina Faso 51.3 Czech Republic 54.2 India 51.7 Lebanon 46.4 Canada 49.9 United States 49.1 Botswana 48.0 Argentina 50.6 Russia 50.3 Hong Kong 46.9 Conscientiousness German Switzerland 53.5 Spain 51.3 Sweden 45.7* Turkey 51.4 Germany 52.3 Croatia 50.3 Burkina Faso 49.7 Chile 52.2 Estonia 50.0 Indonesia 49.6 Median 50.0 49.6 ^Observer rating data were unavailable for Sweden; self-report data are shown (72). www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 310 7 OCTOBER 2005 99 Reports subtracting each judge's rating of the typical American from his or her rating of the typical compatriot for each NCS item. Assuming that cultures agree on the typical American, this procedure in effect subtracts the bias plus a constant and leaves a potentially better estimate of national character. We standardized the differences as T scores, using difference score normative values from the worldwide sample, excluding the United States. The difference scores were highly correlated with NCS scores (rs - 0.65 to 0.91, P < 0.001) and provided essentially the same results. ICCs between difference scores and NEO-PI-R observer ratings ranged from -0.44 for England to 0.48 for Lebanon (median, 0.03). ICCs between differences scores and NEO-PI-R self-reports ranged from -0.47 for Russia to 0.53 for Poland (median, 0.01). For the five factors, correlations with observer ratings across cultures ranged from 0.08 to 0.23, and those with self-reports ranged from -0.37 to 0.23. These results suggest that the lack of correspondence between NEO-PI-R and NCS profiles is not simply due to different standards of evaluation in different cultures. A different issue concerns the reference-group effect (28), according to which self-reports and observer ratings of individuals are implicitly made by reference to the distribution of scores in the rater's culture. Such an effect would tend to make aggregate personality scores uniform for all cultures, and the failure to find correlations with NCS factors would be due to a lack of variation in aggregate NEO-PI-R means. However, NEO-PI-R means in fact vary systematically across cultures and show strong correlations across methods and with other culture-level variables (72, 74). Thus, the reference-group effect cannot explain the failure to find correlations with NCS scales. 28. S. J. Heine, D. R. Lehman, K. P. Peng, J. Greenholtz, j. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 82, 903 (2002). 29. F. van de Vijver, K. Leung, / Pers. 69, 1007 (2001). 30. D. L. Hamilton, T. L. Rose, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 39, 832 (1980). 31. T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality [Norton, New York, 1969 (original work published 1950)]. 32. F. H. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1954). 33. R.R.M. receives royalties from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of NIH, National Institute on Aging. Czech participation was supported by grant 406/01/1507 from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and is related to research plan AV AV0Z0250504 of the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. S.G.'s participation was supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences. Burkinabe and French Swiss participation was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to J.R. The data collection in Hong Kong was supported by Research Grants Council Direct Allocation Grants (DAG02/03.HSS14 and DAG03/04.HSS14) awarded to M.Y. Data collection in Malaysia was supported by Univesiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Fundamental Research Grant 11JD/015/2003 awarded to KAM. Portions of these data were presented at the 113th Convention of the American Psychological Association, August 2005, Washington, DC. For helpful comments on the manuscript, we thank Y. H. Poortinga; for their assistance on this project we thank F. Abal, L. de Almeida, S. Baumann, H. Biggs, D. Bion, A. Butkovic, C. Y. Carrasquillo, H. W. Carvalho, S. Catty, C.-S. Chan, A. Curbelo, P. Duff ill, L. Etcheverry, L. Firpo, J. Gonzalez, A. Gramberg, H. Harrow, H. Imuta, R. Ismail, R. Kamis, S. Kannan, N. Messoulam, F. Molina, M. Montarroyos Calegaro, S. Mosquera, J. C. Munene, V. Najzrova, C. Nathanson, D. Padilla, C. N. Scollon, S. B. Sigurdardottir, A. da Silva Bez, M. Takayama, T. W. Teasdale, L. N. Van Heugten, F. Vera, and J. VillamiL Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/310/5745/96/DC1 Materials and Methods References Tables SI and S2 Appendix SI 11 July 2005; accepted 31 August 2005 10.1126/science.1117199 Transoceanic Migration, Spatial Dynamics, and Population Linkages of White Sharks Ramon Bonfil,1* Michael Meyer,2 Michael C. Scholl,3 Ryan Johnson,4 Shannon O'Brien,1 Herman Oosthuizen,2 Stephan Swanson,2 Deon Kotze,2 Michael Paterson2 i The large-scale spatial dynamics and population structure of marine top predators are poorly known. We present electronic tag and photographic identification data showing a complex suite of behavioral patterns in white sharks. These include coastal return migrations and the fastest known transoceanic return migration among swimming fauna, which provide direct evidence of a link between widely separated populations in South Africa and Australia. Transoceanic return migration involved a return to the original capture location, dives to depths of 980 meters, and the tolerance of water temperatures as low as 3.4°C. These findings contradict previous ideas that female white sharks do not make transoceanic migrations, and they suggest natal homing behavior. Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) occupy the apex of most marine food webs in which they occur. Their major centers of abundance are in the coastal waters of California- wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY, 10460, USA 2Marine and Coastal Management Branch, Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Private Bag X2, Roggebaai 8012, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa. White Shark Trust Post Office Box 1258, Strand Street 6, Gansbaai 7220, Western Cape, South Africa; and Department of Zoology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, Western Cape, South Africa, department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rbonfil@wcs.org fPresent address: Sea Technology Services, Ground Floor, Foretrust House, Martin Hammerschlag Way, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa. Baja California, Australia-New Zealand, South Africa, and, formerly, the Mediterranean Sea (1-3). Management and conservation of this threatened species (4, 5) have been limited, partly because its space utilization and migrations and the linkages between populations were poorly understood and difficult to research until the development of sophisticated telemetry instruments and high-resolution genetic markers for the species (6-9). Long believed to primarily be shelf inhabitants, white sharks are now known to be more pelagic and to travel from California to Hawaii (6). Males are assumed to move between distant populations, whereas females have been assumed to be nonroving and philopatric (9). We tagged white sharks off the Western Cape of South Africa between June 2002 and November 2003 with pop-up archival satellite-transmitting (PAT) tags (n = 25), near-real-time satellite tags (from here onward, "satellite tags") (n = 7), and acoustic tags (n = 25) in order to study their spatial dynamics (table SI). Using high-resolution photographic identification techniques, we have recorded the daily presence or absence of individual white sharks off Gansbaai (34°39'S, 019°24'E; Western Cape) since October 1997 (10). Electronic tagging and photographic identification records reveal complex spatial dynamics in white sharks, which we categorized into four behavioral patterns: rapid transoceanic return migrations, frequent long-distance coastal return migrations, smaller-scale patrolling, and site fidelity. A white shark performed a previously unknown fast transoceanic return migration spanning the entire Indian Ocean, swimming coast-to-coast from South Africa to Australia and back. This ~380-cm total length (TL; measured as a straight line from the tip of the snout to the end of the upper caudal lobe) female shark (number PI2), PAT-tagged on 7 November 2003 off Gansbaai, traveled in 99 days to a location 2 km from shore and 37 km south of the Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia (22°01'05"S, 113°53'13"E; Fig. 1A). This shark's course of —11,100 km (11) entailed a counterclockwise displacement of more than 750 km off the southern tip of Africa, followed by a remarkably direct path toward northwestern Australia, indicating that white sharks do not need oceanic islands as gateways for transoceanic migrations, as previously hypothesized (12). Shark PI 2 traveled at a minimum speed of 4.7 km hour-1 during its migration to Australia (13), which is the fastest sustained long-distance speed known among sharks (14-17) and comparable to 100 7 OCTOBER 2005 VOL 310 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org