Why are East Asians such outliers in the Big Five?
I was interested in how countries and cultures differed according to the most reliable personality metric, and I was surprised at how exceptional Asians seem to be.
They score significantly lowest in every category (Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and even Conscientiousness) but Neuroticism, where they score significantly highest.
To be fair, I could only find one extensive comparative study from 2007 including all of East Asia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230766917_The_geographic_distribution_of_Big_Five_personality_traits.
This study https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179646 doesn't show especially high Neuroticism in S Korea, HK, etc.
What I found odd about the former is that these extremely huge deviations from East Asia were hardly elaborated upon. One thing they did touch on is the fact that they scored significantly lower on even Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, which goes against most preconceptions of East Asians, and this is consistent across both studies.
Anyway, no matter what personality trait you test them on, their scores are completely unlike all other regions. Even SEAs who are genetically and somewhat culturally similar aren't that abnormal.
My superficial guess is that the Sinosphere is pretty much the only region in the world that doesn't follow Abrahamic religions and values. Confucianism is also known to be rather repressive and conformist, which may explain overall low scores and the high Neuroticism.
And despite low Openness and high Neuroticism being correlates for lower intelligence/IQ at least in the West, East Asians are known to have some of the highest average IQs in the world.
Here's a ranking of the countries based on both studies https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/41619-Big-Five-personality-traits-by-country
I was interested in how countries and cultures differed according to the most reliable personality metric, and I was surprised at how exceptional Asians seem to be.
They score significantly lowest in every category (Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and even Conscientiousness) but Neuroticism, where they score significantly highest.
To be fair, I could only find one extensive comparative study from 2007 including all of East Asia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230766917_The_geographic_distribution_of_Big_Five_personality_traits.
This study https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179646 doesn't show especially high Neuroticism in S Korea, HK, etc.
What I found odd about the former is that these extremely huge deviations from East Asia were hardly elaborated upon. One thing they did touch on is the fact that they scored significantly lower on even Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, which goes against most preconceptions of East Asians, and this is consistent across both studies.
Anyway, no matter what personality trait you test them on, their scores are completely unlike all other regions. Even SEAs who are genetically and somewhat culturally similar aren't that abnormal.
My superficial guess is that the Sinosphere is pretty much the only region in the world that doesn't follow Abrahamic religions and values. Confucianism is also known to be rather repressive and conformist, which may explain overall low scores and the high Neuroticism.
And despite low Openness and high Neuroticism being correlates for lower intelligence/IQ at least in the West, East Asians are known to have some of the highest average IQs in the world.
Here's a ranking of the countries based on both studies https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/41619-Big-Five-personality-traits-by-country
