Culture and Identity Lab

Welcome to the UGA Culture and Identity Lab. Our work seeks to better understand how human identity is shaped by culture.

Research

Our work seeks to understand what shapes people's identity. Our research investigates how people think about their identity, changes to their identity, and how identity is different according to cultural context. Many of our studies involve a personality approach to understanding individual differences in identity. The overarching goal of our research is to illuminate what makes people who they are as dynamic complex individuals living across the world.

Person-Culture Personality Fit: Dispositional Traits and Cultural Context Explain Country-Level Personality Profile Conformity

Abstract

In general, people are influenced by the standards set forth by groups of others; however, the levels of such conformity vary between people and across cultures. Here, we investigated factors related to country-level personality profile conformity (i.e., person-culture personality fit) across ∼5.9 million participants, residing in 57 different countries. We examined how each of the Big Five personality traits and cultural tightness are associated with variation in person-culture personality fit. We found that scoring higher in Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and residing in a tight cultural context explains increased personality profile conformity, while scoring higher in Openness and Neuroticism and residing in a loose cultural context explains lower personality profile conformity. Furthermore, we found that Openness and Extraversion interact with cultural context to predict levels of personality profile conformity. These findings reveal that both dispositional and cultural factors correspond to the tendency to conform to country-level norms.