I misread the graph by 90 degrees, I think, but it still doesn't makes sense.

If there's a large genetic influence here, I'm surprised the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. aren't closer together.

Pariah,
Why do you group those 4 countries genetically??

The U.K. and Australia maybe, as Australia is probably >85% of British and Irish origin, but certainly NOT Canada or the US...

I've always noted myself that the Australians seem to have the closest personality type to the Irish, and reports suggest that the Irish component of the population may be as high as 40%...

Israel as the *least* neurotic of all countries

See Footnote 2 -- I think it's just a typo in Lynn's data, for obvious reasons. :) In reality, the Israeli data point is probably just above India's. I kept it as per the data quoted just in case, but yeah, there's no way it's true.

but it still doesn't makes sense

As in, what does it mean if a country is in the upper-right? Or as in, you don't think country X should be where it is?

I can readf the graph now.

Are Indians really the most extraverted except for Nigerians?

Are the Norwegians really that much less neurotic than almost everyone else, and much more extraverted than Finns?

Mostly I've looked at outliers -- but are Brazilians really that normal?

China and Russia do seem about right.

re: india vs. israel. 1 billion ppl vs. 12 million ppl. i think if the dots were proportional in size to intrapopulational variance india would cover half the graph. that needs to be taken into account when comparing across nations-nation-states are somewhat artificial groupings.

Yeah, razib, but that makes the problem worse -- if half the Indians are lower than the Indian average (which is already extreme), that would mean that the other half of the Indians were completely off the chart.

if half the Indians are lower than the Indian average (which is already extreme), that would mean that the other half of the Indians were completely off the chart.

well, the distribution might not be normal, but yeah, i get your point. my point is that india is probably equivalent to all of europe. there is probably at least that amt. of variation within the regions.

Very interested post, Agnostic. The first question is how accurate are these tests of personality? Have they been replicated to fall within a certain result range? I am a little skeptical that these types of tests measure anything real.

That being said, let’s assume that there is legitimacy and reliability in these tests, I have a couple points to add. Of these personality traits introversion/extraversion is probably the most physiologically, and hence genetically, based. I think the other traits have a far greater cultural/historical basis and are much less genetically based.

I can’t make heads or tails out of the psychoticism scores. Assuming that conscientiousness correlates with g, then Czechs, who fall within the typical European range and have one of the better functioning Central European economies, would have to score very low on agreeableness. Having traveled around Central Europe and having intimate familiarity with some of the peoples – Poles and Hungarians, especially – I noticed nothing odd about Czechs.

I do wonder whether or not ‘agreeableness’ has two separate components depending on the introversion/extroversion of a person or population. Introverts who score low on agreeableness would be distant and unfriendly, but not confrontational. Extroverts who score low would be ostensibly more friendly, but very quarrelsome and argumentative, especially among themselves. This may explain the political instability of Central Europe.

The two McCrae charts appear to show some geographical clustering which I didn’t notice on the other charts.

I too found the position of Israelis a bit odd given the neurotic New York Jew stereotype exemplified by Woody Allen’s characters. Perhaps living in Israel among other Jews with external harassment makes Jews less neurotic on a day to day, person to person level.

I too found the position of Israelis a bit odd given the neurotic New York Jew stereotype exemplified by Woody Allen’s characters. Perhaps living in Israel among other Jews with external harassment makes Jews less neurotic on a day to day, person to person level.

only half of israel jews are ashkenazi. 95% of NYC jews are.

I think that some stereotypical Jewish traits are the outcome of a long history of second-class status. Even a century ago Jews could be murdered with impunity in Russia, for example -- not any old time, but now and then during political crises.

Israeli Jews are the boss. They don't expect humiliation, and they get used to dishing it out. Regardless of genetics and ancestry, their character would be different than that of their ancestors in the ghetto.

This is not an anti-Israeli statement. What it says is that the existence of the state of Israel has allowed Jews to act like members of every other successful nationality.

Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" described the way Algerian Arabs under French rule were forced by violence to cringe and wheedle. Jews were in that kind of situation for millenia.

Here in New York, I've known a great many local Ashkenazi Jews, and quite a few AJ's from Russia and a smaller number of Israelis, both AJ and non-AJ.
My personal observations are that Russian and New York Jews, as would be expected, are more similar in personality than their Israeli brethern. While Jewish Israelis are much more extraverted than their local cousins, and the women very sexually forward.

Do you like going to parties? (hate them, rather not, they're OK, like them, love them). When you answer this question you are comparing yourself to your co-nationals. You are not comparing yourself to the international population. I'm afraid this observation might blow away the fun of this study.

Israel 12 million? CIA fact book says 6.5, Gaza 1.4, West Bank 2.5. Were gaza and wb included in the survey under Israel? Egypt was pretty neurotic. I've always thought most arabs I've met were pretty prickly, which is consistent with neurotic and extraverted.

I think the Israelis measure low neurotic because suicide bombings and the effects of military service make everything else seem pretty mild.

The first question is how accurate are these tests of personality? Have they been replicated to fall within a certain result range?

It really varies by factor, but they range from .6ish to .9ish in reliability. Usually, Neuroticism is the highest with Conscientiousness and Openess being among the lower. Their is some evidence that the five factor model might be somewhat mis-specified (i.e., there are error varainces that are related), which would artifically inflate the reliabilities, but not terribly so.

"Do you like going to parties? (hate them, rather not, they're OK, like them, love them)."

I would self-report loving parties, which I do, but I only go to one or two a year.

Steve -- the other traits show roughly the same heritability estimates as Extraversion. Typically, narrow-sense heritability ~ 0.35, broad-sense heritability ~ 0.5, effects of shared environment ~ 0 - 0.05, and the rest due to non-shared environment and errors of measurement. Personality Traits by Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman is searchable at Amazon, so you can look up "heritability" for more detail.

But yes, some show slightly more (non-shared) environmental influence (perhaps another 0.05 - 0.1 in the non-shared environment term), like Neuroticism -- Seed Magazine had a review somewhat recently on the correlation between the prevalence of the pathogen Toxoplasma Gondii and national level of aspects of Neuroticism.

Re: comparison class -- imagine we asked people to rate their agreement with the statement "I am tall." If they were comparing themselves against co-nationals rather than reporting their perceived absolute level of height, then we'd get roughly the same proportions reporting strongly disagree, disagree, neither, agree, and strongly disagree, since there are roughly the same proportions of the population at the national mean, +/- 1 SD, +/- 2 SD, etc. You also wouldn't expect anything real to correlate with mean national height reported in relative terms, since all would roughly be average height.

But in the Lynn & Martin (1995) study, the tabulation of national personality scores was done to see if they correlated with real measures. Sure enough, suicide rate correlated -0.44 with Extraversion, homicide correlated +0.42 with Extraversion, and work ethic correlated -0.48 with Psychoticism.

And if people were reporting relative measures, in a country that truly did have a higher mean level of Extraversion, people there would be comparing themselves to a higher standard, and thus would report lower Extraversion compared to those from truly more introverted countries, who'd be comparing themselves to a pretty low standard. That means that the data points more distanced from the origin are actually backward -- that the Chinese are actually very extraverted while the Puerto Ricans are very introverted, and that the Norwegians are quite emotionally volatile while the Greeks are a model of equanimity. Because that appears not true on its face, and because the real-world correlates are what's expected if the measures are true (i.e., that suicide is more frequent in Japan compared to Puerto Rico), it's safe to assume that these reflect people reporting on their absolute personal level of the trait, and that differences in such levels percolate up to give differences in means across countries.

Razib's right to point out the greater variance of more hetereogenous populations like India or Brazil. The more homogenous ones -- China, Iceland, etc. -- wouldn't sprawl that much beyond their point on the graph, though.

And re: Israel, the non-Ashkenazi Jews (other Jews plus Arab groups) are mostly from the Mediterranean and Middle East, so we can take these countries as a rough measure for the non-Ashkenazi level of Neuroticism. Only Iran is below the global median, while the 1st, 3rd, and 5th countries by high Neuroticism are Greece, Egypt, and Italy (respectively). The Western Med. countries (Spain, Portugal) are also above the global median. Again, where exactly the Israeli Neuroticism level should be is up for debate, but taking into account Askhenazi levels plus the levels in the surrounding Near Eastern countries, it's safe to say it would be above the global median.

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