Xenophilia: Personality x Culture Interactions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Stürmer
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 198803058

Building on an integration of research findings on intergroup behavior from multiple fields of scientific inquiry (biological and cultural paleoanthropology, social psychology), as well as research on the HEXACO personality framework our fresh personality perspective on xenophilie suggests that that individual differences in the levels of endeavor-related personality traits (i.e., Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness) have a substantially greater power in predicting individual differences in xenophilia than individual differences in levels of altruism/cooperation-related traits (i.e., Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, and Agreeableness). A potential limitation of this research is that all studies in the previous project have been conducted in one and same cultural context (Germany). It thus remains fairly unclear whether and to what extent prevalent cultural orientations in the German context (e.g., in terms of cultural individualism, Hofstede, 1980; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) or prevalent group-based beliefs contribute to the observed pattern of personality effects. A main objective of the subsequent project is to establish and test cross-cultural generalizability of our findings. For this pupose a series of cross-cultural survey is conducted. Further and in addition, laboratory experiments test potential interaction between isolated personality dimensions, cultural orientations and group-based beliefs under controlled conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants