Age and Group-Specific Cohort Effects on Personality Test Scores

Abstract

There has been substantial social change in Hawaii in recent decades, with amount of change varying across ethnic groups and probably across sexes as well. If cohort effects have substantial influences on differences in personality test scores across age groups, then group-specific cohort effects should influence the magnitude of age correlations. We report correlations of personality test scores with age separately for members of three ethnic groups-Americans of European, Chinese, and Japanese ancestries living in Hawaii-and for the two sexes. The high degree of similarity in both magnitude and pattern of correlations of personality scale scores with age across sex and ethnic groups suggests that age, not cohort, is the major influence. The relatively small numbers of significant and important sex by age, ethnicity by age, and sex by ethnicity by age interactions support this conclusion.