ArticleNature human behaviour2019
Niche diversity can explain cross-cultural differences in personality structure.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A standardized personality lexicon for enhancing personalized human-machine interaction.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Bounded personality diversity boosts collective intelligence: a swarm optimization approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Human Reproductive Egalitarianism: A Catalyst for the Evolution of Personality Traits.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2025Article
- If Gordon Allport was right, the Likert-type personality scales must be very poor descriptors of personality: he was right.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Agent-based models of the cultural evolution of occupational gender roles.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Evolutionary Psychology and Normal Science: in Search of a Unifying Research Program.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2023Article
- Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- The evolution of personality disorders: A review of proposals.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
- Niche diversity effects on personality measurement - evidence from large national samples during the COVID-19 pandemic.Current research in ecological and social psychology · 2023Article
- How subcultures emerge.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Conceptual and methodological issues in the study of the personality-and-culture relationship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Individual differences in adapting to temperature in French students are only related to attachment avoidance and loneliness.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Niche Diversity Predicts Personality Structure Across 115 Nations.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- The role of family functioning: How the Big Five affect metacognitions about smartphone use.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Practical Methodological Reform Needs Good Theory.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Article
- Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance.Psychological science · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
The covariance structure of personality traits derived from statistical models (for example, Big Five) is often assumed to be a human universal. Cross-cultural studies have challenged this view, finding that less-complex societies exhibit stronger covariation among behavioural characteristics, resulting in fewer derived personality factors. To explain these results, we propose the niche diversity hypothesis, in which a greater diversity of social and ecological niches elicits a broader range of multivariate behavioural profiles and, hence, lower trait covariance in a population. We formalize this as a computational model, which reproduces empirical results from recent cross-cultural studies and also yields an additional prediction for which we find empirical support. This work provides a general explanation for population differences in personality structure in both humans and other animals and suggests a substantial reimagining of personality research: instead of reifying statistical descriptions of manifest personality structures, research should focus more on modelling their underlying causes.
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