Keynote Speakers - Gerard Saucier

Gerard Saucier is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. His over 100 publications address topics spanning from cultural differences to beliefs and values and aspects of psychology of religion to thinking patterns associated with mass violence, but have focused most centrally on the structure and optimal assessment of dispositional attributes such as personality, with a considerable emphasis on cross-cultural evidence. A recipient of an early-career award from Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, he is past Associate Editor for the Journal of Research in Personality and for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Lecture title: A New Frontier: Fine-Grained Personality Factors Across Cultures

About his lecture: In this presentation, I will discuss progress in a developing line of research comparing structures of personality attributes derived from multiple languages. But rather than comparing at the now-conventional few-factor level, which tends to compromise comprehensiveness and prediction, relatively robust structures of many (e.g., 20 to 50) factors are compared in search of those that arise most ubiquitously across cultures, while also enabling identification of culture-specific constructs. I will present illustrative results from several languages from widely different cultural settings and that give insights into the distinct advantages and challenges of this avenue of research.