Exploring implicit personality theories with indigenous or imported constructs: the Chinese case.

This study is concerned with the relation between indigenous and imported constructs of personality perception. A pool of Chinese personality descriptors was used by Chinese Ss to rate a variety of target persons. These same Ss then rated the same target persons using the (translated) personality descriptions first isolated by Tupes and Christal (1961) from Americans. Five factors of personality perception were then derived from both the emic Chinese descriptors and the imported American descriptors. The interrelations among these factors were examined to address the basic question of how adequately the factors gleaned from these foreign materials represented Chinese perceptual space. Of the 5 Chinese factors, 4 could be adequately explained by varying combinations of the 5 imported factors. Furthermore, there was a 1-to-1 relation of imported to indigenous factors for only 2 of the 5 indigenous factors, whereas the others were multiply determined. The implications of these results are discussed with respect to the widespread use of foreign instrumentation and the models of man that may or may not be constructed in consequence.