Personality and Cultural Attitudes

Abstract

In a multicultural society, people can embrace or reject cultural diversity to different degrees. These mixed feelings can be more salient in certain contexts that stir intercultural conflicts, but they can also arise from within people’s nature. Recent research suggests that cultural attitudes may partially result from personality traits that compose our human nature. My doctoral project investigates cultural attitudes, which represent both negative and positive attitudes towards ethnocultural groups and their relationships with personality and ideological attitudes. I conducted two independent studies that will examine negative (prejudice) and positive (appreciation) cultural attitudes. In my first study, I built on and extended the influential Dual Process Model (DPM; Duckitt, 2001) by positing that personality traits predict cultural attitudes through two different mediated mechanisms: 1) Agreeableness predicts cultural attitudes through social dominance orientation (SDO), whereas 2) Openness predicts cultural attitudes through right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Notably, I extended the Dual Process Model given that the original version (DPM) only explains prejudice, whereas my version (DPM-2) explains both cultural prejudice and cultural appreciation as dual outcomes. This first study is a meta-analysis that reviews all empirical work that can pertain to the DPM and the DPM-2. My meta-analysis provides shows that the DPM and the DPM-2 seem to be supported by the data. It also shows that cultural prejudice and cultural appreciation are related to personality and ideological attitudes to a different extent. This finding suggest that cultural prejudice and cultural attitudes are partially distinct. My second study validates a much-needed cultural attitudes scale (prejudice and appreciation) that is adapted to the Canadian multicultural context: The Multi-outgroup Inventory of Cultural Attitudes (MICA). This study shows that in the first sample, the factorial structure of the MICA is supported, the MICA scores are reliable, and the scale has a good validity. The second independent sample of this study replicates almost all the results, which provide event more support for the validity and reliability of the scores of MICA. The relationship between the cultural prejudice factor and the cultural appreciation factor of the MICA shows that the factors are negatively related, and partially distinct. This doctoral project contributes to a better understanding of prejudice and appreciation of ethnocultural groups in a multicultural context. Overall, it shows that cultural prejudice and cultural appreciation are negatively related constructs that are at least partially distinct.