Browsing by Subject "WEIRD"

Objectives. The five-factor model of personality is the most researched and widely accepted theory of the structure of personality. It is claimed to be a near universal even though studies of the model have overwhelmingly relied on samples from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations and/or university or college students from non-WEIRD countries. Therefore, multiple scholars have called for studies that examine personality traits with other kinds of samples, but only relatively few studies like that have been conducted. The aims of this study were to examine whether the model is suitable to explain personality variation in elephant handlers, or mahouts, from Myanmar, and, if it is not applicable, how personality appears to manifest in the mahouts. Testing whether the model applies to this sample is highly valuable for assessing the model’s cultural variability and the claims about its near universality. Methods. The sample (n = 237) consisted of 138 mahouts and 99 of their peers, most of whom were fellow mahouts. They gave self- or observer ratings to an interviewer asking questions from the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI), which was translated into Burmese. Self-observer agreement and retest correlations were also calculated. The personality structure of the 138 mahouts was investigated with confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis. Results. The confirmatory factor analysis resulted in a covariance matrix of latent variables that was not positive-definite possibly because of the small sample size. The analysis method was then changed into exploratory factor analysis, and models with four, five, and six factors were com-pared in more detail. However, no clean factor structure emerged since the items measuring Open-ness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism in the BFI did not, in general, load in a clear or sensible way in any of the factor solutions. Conclusions. These results could provide support for the hypothesis that mahout personality cannot be described with the five factors. Their personality variation may instead be organized along differently composed dimensions. This study could therefore be another example of the five-factor model of being more culture-specific than (near) universal.