Cross-Cultural Differences in Intelligence and Personality

Abstract

Cross-cultural studies of intelligence and personality are concemed first with the measurement of the differ-ences between peoples, and second with the explana-tion of the causes of these differences. The measure-ment largely takes the form of adrninistering tests to representative samples of the populations in different societies and comparing the scores. Theoretical expla-nations look first for correlates of these differences and then postulate causes. For example, if it were found that national anxiety levels were strongly related to poverty it rnight be reasonable to propose that poverty is an important cause of differences in anxiety levels between nations. There are three broad theoretical positions for explaining cross-cultural differences. These are desig-nated the "absolutist," "universalist," and "rela-tivist" theories by Berry~ Poortinga, Segall, and Dasen (1992), but these labels are not properly self-explan-atory. Better terms for these theories are (a) biological, (b) biological-cultural interaction, and (c) cultural. The biological positionisthat intelligence and person-ality differences between disparate peoples are solely the result of biological dissimilarities, although it is doubtful whether any one maintains this. The