Personality among the Maasai
Nov. 17th, 2011 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday I attended G’s lab group meeting, where he presented a manuscript he’s had around for a while, detailing some personality research that he and colleagues did among the Maasai, in East Africa. My expectation for how psychologists would study personality has been that they’d research how differences develop among individuals, and I’m sure that’s part of what they do, but G’s work is more in the lexical tradition, which to me seems a lot more like anthropology. Basically, for any given culture, they start with attribute-related words in the dictionary, then they ask people to rate themselves or another on each of the attributes, and then they use statistical techniques like factor analysis to identify the various themes that exist among the attributes. In essence, they’re trying to learn how people think about themselves, or about other people, in terms of descriptors.
Most of these studies, of course, have been done in Western societies, and they’ve found five personality dimensions that they considered to be human universals. Of course, Western societies don’t exactly represent the breadth of humanity, so it’s worthwhile to correct this early assertion by expanding these studies to places like rural Africa. One of G’s colleagues who speaks Maa travelled to more than 80 villages and interviewed people orally, to get the data, since the typical Maasai is not literate. Interestingly, the personality dimensions emerging from how the Maasai think about and talk about others had little to do with the Western “Big Five” – rather, they focused more on virtues and ways that a person might be incompetent without necessarily lacking virtue.
Edited to add:
My own Big Five profile: O84-C74-E42-A44-N66.
(Though usually I'm more strongly introverted than this version says.)
Most of these studies, of course, have been done in Western societies, and they’ve found five personality dimensions that they considered to be human universals. Of course, Western societies don’t exactly represent the breadth of humanity, so it’s worthwhile to correct this early assertion by expanding these studies to places like rural Africa. One of G’s colleagues who speaks Maa travelled to more than 80 villages and interviewed people orally, to get the data, since the typical Maasai is not literate. Interestingly, the personality dimensions emerging from how the Maasai think about and talk about others had little to do with the Western “Big Five” – rather, they focused more on virtues and ways that a person might be incompetent without necessarily lacking virtue.
Edited to add:
My own Big Five profile: O84-C74-E42-A44-N66.
(Though usually I'm more strongly introverted than this version says.)