Personality-and-culture: The case of national extraversion and word-of-mouth

One advantage of the recently revitalized “personality-and-culture” paradigm is its capacity to describe both individual- and culture-level differences. Another advantage is personality-and-culture's foundation in the extensive heritage of theory development and empirics in personality psychology itself, in which traits have been related to a variety of observable behaviors and to underlying physiological, neurological, and genetic structures. Personality-and-culture also builds on recent, substantial methodological and analytic advances specific to cross-cultural research including progress in data collection capabilities, in computational power, and in tools for statistical analyses of bias and equivalence. This article reviews these advances in personality-and-culture and then report preliminary empirics linking nation-level extraversion to differences in preferences for interpersonal sources of product information (i.e., word-of-mouth), thus clarifying national differences in reliance on interpersonal sources of information and, most importantly, demonstrating the general value of the personality-and-culture approach.