Editorial Personality and Culture Cross-Cultural Psychology at the Next Crossroads Jüri Allik 1,2 , Koorosh Massoudi 3 , Anu Realo 1 , and Jérôme Rossier 3 1 Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Estonia, 2 Estonian Academy of Sciences, Estonia, 3 Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland Swiss Journal of Psychology, 71 (1), 2012, 5–12 DOI 10.1024/1421-0185/a000069 Abstract. A review of nearly three decades of cross-cultural research shows that this domain still has to address several issues regarding the biases of data collection and sampling methods, the lack of clear and consensual definitions of constructs and variables, and mea- surement invariance issues that seriously limit the comparability of results across cultures. Indeed, a large majority of the existing studies are still based on the anthropological model, which compares two cultures and mainly uses convenience samples of university students. This paper stresses the need to incorporate a larger variety of regions and cultures in the research designs, the necessity to theorize and identify a larger set of variables in order to describe a human environment, and the importance of overcoming methodological weaknesses to improve the comparability of measurement results. Cross-cultural psychology is at the next crossroads in it’s development, and re- searchers can certainly make major contributions to this domain if they can address these weaknesses and challenges. Keywords: cross-cultural psychology, personality assessment, culture People have long been interested in other cultures, and con- tact between people of different cultures and ethnic groups is not a new phenomenon. Throughout human history, peo- ple have traveled all over the world for different reasons. As early as the first century of the Common Era, the Roman historian Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 56–ca. 117 CE) de- scribed in his travel notes how the German tribes lived far to the North, providing a very detailed description of their physical characteristics, lands, laws, and customs. He also commented on the general character of the Germanic peo- ples, particularly on their fierce and independent spirit. In doing so, however, Tacitus was also speaking of Rome in comparison, commenting as much on the Rome of his own time as on the German tribes. The first deliberate attempt to collect cross-cultural data was probably a missionary model. Hugo Magnus (1842–1907), for instance, an ophthalmologist working in Breslau, was interested in the claim that people from “prim- itive” nations may be color-blind, something four-time British Prime Minister William Gladstone had once main- tained about Greeks living at the time when Homeric po- etry was created (Deutscher, 2010). He sent color probes to missionaries and merchants around the world who re- ported back from the most remote corners of the earth, all indicating that the savages’ color vision was pretty similar to that of people living in a more “enlightened” conditions. Of course, this method was neither formulated nor utilized exclusively by psychologists. Linguists and biologists, in- cluding Charles Darwin, used this handy method, which was sometimes the only one available, to find answers to questions they had struggled with. The second, an anthropological method of data collec- tion, was probably devised by British psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) – whom Claude Lévi-Strauss called the Galileo of anthropology – during what is known as the Torres Straits Expedition (Deutscher, 2010). The advanta- ges of this more sophisticated method over one using near- ly anecdotal missionary reports are obvious: It showed that it was possible to bring experimental laboratory methods even to places that were untouched by civilization. The on- ly serious limitation was low productivity: Well-prepared and well-equipped expeditions could cover only a limited number of geographic locations. The third method of cross-cultural data collection is unre- producible nowadays, at least in its original form. To cele- brate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, The World’s Fair was held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. Max Weber, who was amazed by everything that American capi- talist spirit had to offer, especially by the dazzling lights of the Palace of Electricity, was among the many visitors (Fer- guson, 2011, p. 260). However, the main attractions were “savages” who had been brought to St. Louis from all over the world and arranged into “villages” ordered according to their supposed closeness to the animal kingdom (Deutscher, 2010). Robert Woodworth (1869–1962), one of the founding fathers of American psychology, was prepared to receive this unexpected gift by carrying out an extensive psychological study. In his report published in Science, he concluded that Swiss J. Psychol. 71 (1) © 2012 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern