[…] embody phenotypes that are continuously distributed in the population. My earlier post Predictions on the Worldwide Distribution of Personality illustrates this to an extent. For example, both anxious and psychopathic tendencies are not […]

[…] would be tempted to add a key component a nonviolent, genetically pacified populace (see my own Predictions on the Worldwide Distribution of Personality and Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification by Peter Frost), but every […]

@Jayman, No I haven’t seen that movie. I actually stopped watching Woody Allen movies for a long time because I just couldn’t stand the neurotic people… it’s so at odds with my personality that it grates on me at a very deep level. I just want to strangle them or slap them, it’s bad. Luckily Allen stopped making all his movies with himself as the lead and many of his later movies are some of my all time favorites. Midnight in Paris with Owen Wilson felt like my life story… incredible move. Also, as I’ve mentioned on my blog somewhere the Blue Jasmine movie was very hard to watch due to the neurotic/narcissistic heroine/anti-heroine but I loved it for it’s catharsis. Meh, I guess I never know what I’ll like until I try something.

I don’t have a ton more anecdotes, I have been less interested in people in groups as I have been people as individuals lately as I’m working on getting better at characters so I’m drawing faces all day every day and pushing them in odd, hopefully fun and expressive, ways.

I will tell you that I find the Irish and Polish more fun to be around than the English or German extracted, but that’s because I’m always up for something crazy and I tire quickly of pompous intellectual talk especially when it feels like people are engaging in conversation for the sole purpose of pea-cocking their own intelligence. When I see a spark in someone’s eyes as they describe their work on nano-particles and their endless fascination with them, that I can abide, but it’s far rarer than intellectual peacocks.

I’ve been watching you on twitter, always entertaining.

~S

I suspect things will vary by population. As a mixed clannish(Irish, Polish) and unclannish(English,German) person, my own experience isn’t very useful, although there are a lot of mixed heritage people in the US today. However, I live in a part of the US with a lot of Irish and Polish and I find they are impulsive, clannish(family oriented but not to extent of Italian Americans), and hot tempered/emotionally reactive but with little anxiety, I don’t see people taking anxiety meds or worrying about things much. However my wife joined a group of moms on facebook a while back and the entire group except for her are from Mass and let me tell you, the anxiety and manic behavior among those women is insane! Every one of them has some kind of prescription for anxiety. I’ll have to ask her to poll the women for their ethnic ancestry. I’m betting it’s mostly English.

I have to imagine honesty-humility is substantially negatively correlated with IQ. Also, I don’t see blind obedience or a desire to put someone away for 3 years over a $20 theft to be desirable traits in any way, shape, or form. Valuing property over life to that extent is true psychopathy.

[…] Predictions on the Worldwide Distribution of Personality – There is more to HBD than IQ. And as we see all human behavioral traits are heritable. There are significant differences between different human groups, and this is my post on how some of the basic personality differences (as measured by the six-factor HEXACO model) might vary across the world, and, perhaps just as importantly, why they came to be so. What selective pressures led to these differences? I discuss here. […]

As you know Jayman, I share your view about avoiding the ‘cult of IQ.’ I focus on character traits (or ‘cultural values’ as they’re often called) in my research, too.

I’ve trawled through lots of cross-national value surveys. Many originally came from the business world (age of globalization, natch), but are I think broadly applicable. I read all the methodology and questionnaires too. I know you’re well-acquainted with World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, but just thought I’d throw a few links your way for possible future reference:

-My all-time favorite is the GLOBE study, from the U. of Pennsylvania in the 1990s. Guess it’s a little dated now, but still very good. A nine-value scale. (All countries’ value scales in this PDF, starting p. 25). Interesting stuff.

–Shalom Schwartz: He developed the European Social Survey value scale. Has done loads of cross-national values studies. A smaller selection of countries.

–Geert Hofstede, who I’m not a huge fan of (not crazy about his methodology), but he’s a pioneer in this field, so he gets referred to a lot.

Schwart’s and Hofstede’s complete all-country data can be found in this PDF.

I’ve also visualized a lot of the data in color-coded tables, for example like this. Have it all on Excel docs. If ever in the future you’d want to take a look at any of it, let me know. It’s so nice to see others focusing on personality instead of just IQ, especially you and HBD Chick.

[…] Predictions on the Worldwide Distribution of Personality […]

[…] I discussed previously in my post Predictions on the Worldwide Distribution of Personality, historic selective forces can be correlated to personality traits. For example, openness to […]

First off, the part about Greece was in response to Staffan and posts he has made on the topic previously, not you. Sorry if you got the wrong impression.

“Wrong. The scores from these tests correlate as highly with IQ tests as well as different IQ tests correlate with each other. They are IQ tests like the WISC and SAT. Do not repeat that claim here.”

Like I said, this is comes almost entirely from the assertions of a small number of people like Rindermann and Lynn. They and a small number of others are genuinely the only ones who assert as such. These tests have not been subjected to the rigors and extensive independent analysis of tests like the ASVAB, SAT etc. You will not find anything find anything approaching the level of analysis they have compared to the PISA and TIMSS. Their correlations have long been based on Lynn’s IQ figures, which have long been wrought with issues, and from what I’ve seen, there’s long been some bizarre figures in PISA/TIMSS data, like various SS african countries outscoring much of latin america, some developed countries (like Norway) producing virtually no advanced students, Kyrgyzstan having an IQ of under 70 (the lowest) etc.

I’m aware there’s another recent paper promoting their validity, but I am unable to access it, and I’m willing to admit they’re more valid than I give them credit for, but from what I’ve really seen, I am doubtful. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

“There is going to be variability in the scores of certain countries based on the test used, sampling issues, both random and non-random, transformations made by researchers, etc. This has been discussed to death as per the Ron Unz fiasco. That’s the nature of the beast. While there may be some valid points in analysis of these, it must be done properly. Tread very carefully on this subject.”

This is all true, but I consider Thailand’s case very noteworthy for the fact the government used widely agreed upon IQ tests, with a sample size of over 70k from every single province, as opposed to Lynn’s original IQ figures, which came from a single province.

“No, but the situation in the country both now and historically does render an average IQ of 80 plausible, if not necessarily exactly accurate.”

Well, that’s an entirely different can of worms (though I consider the idea they’re that low absolutely bizarre and naive), but since you honestly think this could be a genuine reflection of their abilities, there are these two maps from your site:
http://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/europe-iq-hajnal-1200.png

You put the 2nd together on your own, so I’m not sure what you base this on, but how can you see this as valid when when Bosnia and Herzegovina apparently shot up by 11 points, Montenegro by 5 and Albania dropped by two? Albania showed the most consistency, but, there’s the large discrepancy with Bosnia/Herzegovina and Montenegro.

And to make it clear, I am not an anti-hereditarian or an “HBD denier”- I just don’t believe the bulk of these national IQ figures. There are clearly inherent differences in national/racial intelligence, but I don’t the figures we see trotted out are not illustrative of what it really looks like.

Also, in my prior post, meant to say “without correction.”

The PISA and TIMSS have not been validated as being just as good as IQ tests. This is mainly the assertion of the small number of researchers, like Rindermann and Lynn who say they are. It’s worth considering how Thailand ended up with an IQ of 98.6 after the Thai government decided to use the Standard Progressive Matrices, IE, a test that is widely agreed upon as a measurement of intelligence as opposed to “scientific achievement tests” regarded as such by a small circle of researchers and their fans on the internet: http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/thai-national-iq-98-race-realism-sucks-another-big-one/

While this is undoubtedly brought up by the Chinese, this score is likewise with correction for malnutrition, disease and other transient environmental factors, so it is entirely possible that Thailand’s IQ is over 100, and that the native Thai are no less than the high 90’s in their scores.

Now, if you look in the comments, there is some possibility that these scores might be off with what Sagat brings up, but he later concedes, although begrudgingly, they are indeed accurate. In face of this, it draws into question the figures we typically see for southeast asia, and by extension, elsewhere.

“In Albania, people often go from A to B by way of horse and carriage. Electricity comes and goes erratically. Clan feuds are common. Sounds like IQ 80 to me.”

The country has poor infrastructure and there’s a lot of clan violence, therefore, they must be dumber than american blacks.

And since you seem to be a firm believer in Greece having an IQ of 92: https://web.archive.org/web/20080805140647/http://www.geocities.com/dienekesp2/greekiq/index.html

Lynn’s national IQ scores correlate around 0.9 to PISA and TIMSS, 0.7 to various GDP measures, 0.5 to economic growth measures, (not adjusted for oil or other natural resources) and higher for the longer time periods.

Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611001413

In Albania, people often go from A to B by way of horse and carriage. Electricity comes and goes erratically. Clan feuds are common. Sounds like IQ 80 to me.

“Like quite a few other HBD’ers, I try not to focus so much on IQ. Although it is of preeminent importance, it is not the be-all end-all when it comes to human traits, particularly traits that differ between people. ”

In face of your posts about national IQ figures, where you seem to swallow figures put out by Lynn and co. with little to no skepticism (Portugal and Southern Italy having IQ’s far below the rest of Europe, Albania having an IQ of 80 etc.) or internet IQ test results for China and how prop them up as such great explanatory figures, this comes as a surprise.

Eysenck’s psychoticism is a kind of reverse of the Big Five openness: instead of linking creativity to nice liberal qualities he linked it to antisocial tendencies and sensation seeking. But creative people are rarely into immediate gratification, as the angry man-children you’ll find in jail. They can work for years and even decades before bringing something to completion. I think schizotypy remains the best measure of creativity (apart from the work itself of course).

@ Jayman – “In my observation, it appears the more permissive a society is about sex, the lower its average sex drive tends to be. ”

I completely agree with this statement. Also, in my experience, individuals [females at least] from societies with lower average iqs tend towards more frequent but less creative sex, while individuals from societies with higher average iqs tend towards less frequent but more creative sex. I know that you previously wrote about ‘iq and kink’ in an earlier post. Clearly the various personality traits discussed are also involved. I suspect that higher iq and/or more introverted male individuals might have a lower average ‘sex drive’, but might actually masturbate very frequently [ie their introversion prevents them approaching women or from demanding the frequency or kinkiness of sex with their partner that they actually fantasised about]. The lower sex drive might be partly hormonal, but is also psychologically influenced to a large degree. Maybe a country like Japan would fall into this category.

Here’s a discussion of psychoticism: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2012/06/creativity-and-eysencks-psychoticism.html

What about Hans Eysenck’s psychological trait of “psychoticism”? That’s not quite the same thing as neuroticism is it?

Interesting that the last image posts up differences in personality using the term active.

In this context, and of cross nations and personality –

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140422121237.htm

“A study of nearly 4,000 college students in 19 countries has uncovered new details about why neurotic people may avoid making decisions and moving forward with life. Turns out that when they are asked if action is positive, favorable, good, they just don’t like it as much as non-neurotics…”People who are less emotionally stable have less positive attitudes towards action and more positive attitudes toward inaction,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, anxiety was primarily responsible for neurotic individuals’ less positive attitudes toward action. The link between neuroticism and less positive attitudes toward action was strongest among individuals who endorsed more collectivistic than individualistic beliefs.“

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130903113311.htm

People in East Asian countries seem to strike the best balance (their interpretation) between liking action and inaction, whereas someone from the Mediterranean area of the world are far less likely to have achieved the same balance. (preferring action most strongly).

How is Japan not blue, or at least green?

I suspect the Japanese are not as libertine in actual practice as their porn might suggest. Very high numbers of Japanese adults report being virgins into their 40s and beyond, for example. The Duggers are probably having far more sex than the average Japanese folks.

If you still have the patience to put up with me , I’ll understand when you see my comment being accepted .
People talk on environmental factors , but I think the environmental issue only appears when it comes to environmental outcomes . Environmental factors supposedly predict the future when in fact , are the genetic predispositions that do.
Therefore , the environmental results , ie the results caused by the combination and interaction of different phenotypes in environments created anthropomorphically , are in fact what we call environmental influences .
Each and every event that we have analyzed to date are predictive of past events , a chain of them, like the cycle of poverty .
Only two situations in which environmental factors can be taken into consideration. When man interacts directly with nature .
When men migrate to a new land , to create a new society , in this case , we still have the above situation , but based on a design of anthropomorphic transformation. Any human society is designed by humans and obviously by genes . In a large city, the main and significant interaction that will prevail precisely gene – to – gene, phenotype – to – phenotype , since a city is the representation of its population genetics . The church in the city center , the main square , explains his religious tendencies , while shopping and museum explains its secularism .

Lots to consider here. My first reflection is that clannish people may only seem dark to outsiders. Really WEIRD people think of animals as family/ingroup. They look at the majority’s cruelty and deceitfulness towards animals and think of them as dark. Then there is the buddhist who cares for plants… We can only measure honesty/humility and dark tetrad in regard to what the person views as morally relevant.

Also, clannish people are often sun people who are impulsive sensation seekers, something that is linked to bad behavior due to urges and lack of self-control rather than cruel intent. The clannish Chinese do not share these traits and come off as less dark (although not necessarily as less corrupted). Honesty/humility also relates to empathy which is in turn linked to the strength of the fight/flight response.

That is to say that honesty/humility is a complex trait made up of more fundamental and biological traits like clannishness/ingroup and sensation seeking, fight/flight and that those latter traits should be used for a model or theory of personality rather than the complex ones of the Big Five or the HEXACO.

I’d imagine that prudishness is less correlated to clannishness than other traits. Other traits like shyness or anxiety can rapidly change the way people see sex. On top of that, I just can’t figure out, from a clannishness perspective, why Japan is so sexually libertine compared to its neighbors, including otherwise very similar cultures like South Korea. My guess is germs, along with inbreeding, play a big role in dictating how people feel about sexual freedom.

Why isn’t IQ considered a personality trait?

It seems that self-rating is ultimately not very sound even within one culture, as people will rate themselves against their local background. Also, people will tend to make themselves look “better” than they really are, for some value of “better”. (I’ve taken a few personality tests for jobs before, and they’re painfully transparent in the answers they’re looking for.)

I haven’t read many GWAS/GTCA papers discussing personality in terms of in/out breeding. I am not sure what you would make of this but you might find it interesting.
Karin_J_H_Verweij et al MAINTENANCE OF GENETIC VARIATION
IN HUMAN PERSONALITY: TESTING EVOLUTIONARY MODELS BY ESTIMATING HERITABILITY DUE TO COMMON CAUSAL VARIANTS AND INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF DISTANT INBREEDING EVOLUTION 10 2012 66 (10)3238

@jayman – “Yet there is a major problem: personality tests are hard to do cross nationally. Why? Because people tend to rate themselves against the background and mores of their own societies, and not against the global background in these traits.”

aye, there’s the rub right there! *sigh*

The triangle chart seems ok, though there ought to be countries in the middle, too. My parents are both from countries near the red pole, but themselves are much closer to the teal pole (on the purplish side). That probably explains why they did so well in the U.S.

The HEXACO is based on the lexical hypothesis, taking a big list of descriptive words people use about individuals (themselves?) and seeing how they cluster.

It’s not necessarily the case that between nation differences would manifest as differences within populations, for the same reason as for instance face shape differences between nations are orthogonal to within nation differences.

The normal cultural dimensions used by Hofstede and others to capture national culture differences, like individualism-collectivism, come from world wide samples of people talking about their values, and do not form the same structure as the Big 5 or HEXACO, although there are correlations.

It would be interesting to run it on people talking about ethnic groups and nations, to see what the recapitulated structure would be (own nation bias should generally).

Yet there is a major problem: personality tests are hard to do cross nationally. Why? Because people tend to rate themselves against the background and mores of their own societies, and not against the global background in these traits.

Mass comparison of language used by facebookers between nations might be interesting – http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0073791 / http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0073791.g006&representation=PNG_M

Condition linguistic norms against a minimum set of cultures, use to estimate. If a culture is writing “pissed”, “lonely”, “stressed”, etc. all over it’s facebooks then it’s probably neurotic, if they talk about religion and sports all the time, probably emotionally stable, if they’re talking about anime and computers all the time, probably introverted, etc…

(although some of this is not sufficiently structured for age, the mean age in the above study is too low, which limits its predictive accuracy. the word clouds are age standardized, but that can only do so much if you pool is so skewed (age about 8 sds too low for the sample)).

(figure 2 for other of the Big 5 traits – “fucking” seems to go against just about any desirable trait, while the Openness traits are amusing in pitting the pretentious and mildly negative / affectless against the illiterate and slightly happy. Perhaps the more intellectual effort you make relative to your IQ, the more likely you are to run into a brick wall and become slightly depressed?).

Love this post, very interesting.

I went and took a Hexaco at the Alaska research group’s psychometrics page so I could see how my Big five Neuroticism result compared to the HEXACO’s Emotionality scale. What I like the most about the Hexaco is how it breaks down your result. My Emotionality general score is only a bit smaller than average. However when you break it down you see that on the subsets of Anxiety, Dependence and Fearfulness I score very low (anxiety was zero) but my ‘Sentimentality’ score was in the 92nd percentile. That seems odd. Either I am really really weird (a possibility, I also score almost 100% on Hexaco’s Openness measure) or maybe these items shouldn’t all be grouped together. I wonder how often people have very high differences between the measures within one section.

~S