Niche diversity predicts personality structure across 115 nations

The niche diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait-combinations within a society. It predicts that personality traits will be both more variable and differentiated in populations with more distinct social and ecological niches. Prior tests of this hypothesis in 55 nations suffer from potential confounds associated with differences in the measurement properties of personality scales across groups. Using psychometric methods for the approximation of cross-national measurement invariance, we test the niche diversity hypothesis in a sample of 115 nations (N = 685,089). We find that an index of niche diversity was robustly associated with lower inter-trait covariance and greater personality dimensionality across nations but was not consistently related to trait variances. These findings generally bolster the core of the niche diversity hypothesis, demonstrating the contingency of human personality structure on socioecological contexts.