National Characteristics

Do different nationalities have different psychological characteristics? This question is often avoided as being too controversial, but it is squarely faced in this illuminating comparative study, first published in 1985. Dean Peabody focuses principally on six nations: Britain, Germany, France, Italy and the two world powers, Russia and America, where extensive empirical studies have been conducted to ascertain what ordinary people judge to be national characteristics (often dismissed as ‘national stereotypes’). These results are compared and contrasted with those from social scientific accounts of ‘national character’, and there is a perhaps surprising level of agreement between the two. Moreover, as Professor Peabody’s systematic cross-national survey demonstrates, the psychological characteristics of different nationalities do differ in fundamental ways.