ArticleScience advances2019
Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations.
Article in Science advances, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 220 citations in OpenAlex.
- Self-Report Questionnaires to Measure Big Five Personality Traits in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2025Pooled it
- The association between the Big Five personality traits and smartphone use disorder: A meta-analysis.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2020Pooled it
- Behavioral Profiles in Romanian Resident Physicians: An Exploratory Study with Implications for Medical Education and Human Resource Development.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Big five and higher-order personality traits matter for climate-risk perception among moroccan farmers.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Exploratory Graph Analysis Failed to Reproduce the Hypothesized Functional Zoning Framework in the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills.PsyCh journal · 2026Article
- The effect of compulsory education on non-cognitive skills: Evidence from low- and middle-income countries.Economics of education review · 2025Article
- Simpson's gender-equality paradox.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Are Higher-Order Constructs in Evolutionary Psychology Attributable to Omitted Cross-Loading Bias? An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling Approach.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Emotion Regulation and Self-Efficacy: The Mediating Role of Emotional Stability and Extraversion in Adolescence.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The lay of the land: Associations between environmental features and personality.Journal of personality · 2024Article
- Conversational Silencing of Racism in Psychological Science: Toward Decolonization in Practice.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Dimensional models of personality disorders: Challenges and opportunities.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
- Editorial: an emerging field with bright prospects.Personality neuroscience · 2023Article
- Niche diversity effects on personality measurement - evidence from large national samples during the COVID-19 pandemic.Current research in ecological and social psychology · 2023Article
- Childhood adversity and educational attainment: Evidence from Zambia on the role of personality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- A prediction-focused approach to personality modeling.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Stability and change in the Big Five personality traits: Findings from a longitudinal study of Mexican-origin adults.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2022Article
- Personality predictors of cognitive dispersion: A coordinated analysis of data from seven international studies of older adults.Neuropsychology · 2022Article
- Simple questionnaires outperform behavioral tasks to measure socio-emotional skills in students.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Editorial: From West to East: Recent Advances in Psychometrics and Psychological Instruments in Asia.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear. Adopting a comprehensive psychometric approach to analyze 29 face-to-face surveys from 94,751 respondents in 23 low- and middle-income countries, we show that commonly used personality questions generally fail to measure the intended personality traits and show low validity. These findings contrast with the much higher validity of these measures attained in internet surveys of 198,356 self-selected respondents from the same countries. We discuss how systematic response patterns, enumerator interactions, and low education levels can collectively distort personality measures when assessed in large-scale surveys. Our results highlight the risk of misinterpreting Big Five survey data and provide a warning against naïve interpretations of personality traits without evidence of their validity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.