Department/School

Psychology, Professional

Date of this version

2013

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Consensual stereotypes of some groups are relatively accurate, whereas others are not. Previous work suggesting that national character stereotypes are inaccurate has been criticized on several grounds. In this article we (a) provide arguments for the validity of assessed national mean trait levels as criteria for evaluating stereotype accuracy and (b) report new data on national character in 26 cultures from descriptions (N = 3323) of the typical male or female adolescent, adult, or old person in each. The average ratings were internally consistent and converged with independent stereotypes of the typical culture member, but were weakly related to objective assessments of personality. We argue that this conclusion is consistent with the broader literature on the inaccuracy of national character stereotypes.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2013.08.006

Volume

47

Issue

6

Published in

Journal of Research in Personality

Citation/Other Information

McCrae R., Chan, W., Jussim, L., De Fruyt, F., Löckenhoff, C. E., De Bolle, M., Costa, P., Hřebíčková, M., Graf, S., Realo, A., Allik, J., Nakazato, K., Shimonaka, Y., Yik, M., Ficková, E., Brunner-Sciarra, M., Reátigui, N., Leibovich de Figueora, N., Schmidt, V., Ahn, C.,...Terracciano, A. (2013). The Inaccuracy of National Character Stereotypes. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(6), 831-842. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2013.08.006

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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