Multicultural Personality

The term multicultural personality was first coined by Professor Manuel Ramirez (University of Texas at Austin) to describe individuals who successfully negotiate and thrive in multiple cultures simultaneously. Ramirez conceptualized the multicultural personality in terms bicultural life-skills development. Specifically, he believed that immigrants to the United States who successfully synthesized components of their original-country worldview with the hostcountry worldview could develop broad multicultural coping and thinking styles that would facilitate their adjustment to and quality of life in the United States.

Since Ramirez's pioneering work on the multicultural personality, other researchers anchored in diverse psychology disciplines have expanded the construct. For example, working in the Netherlands in the field of organizational psychology, Professors Karen van der Zee and Jan Pieter van Oudenhoven examined the multicultural personality within the context of expatriates adapting to work and life in international contexts. Professor Joseph G. Ponterotto and colleagues in the United States addressed the multicultural personality as a positive indicator of enhanced quality of life for Americans living in an increasingly diverse society. These authors hypothesize that individuals who have multicultural personalities will adapt more effectively to a rapidly changing society and will exhibit higher levels of psychological and physical well-being.

The most comprehensive definition of the multicultural personality has been offered by Professors Joseph G. Ponterotto, Shawn O. Utsey, and Paul B. Pedersen, who noted that the multicultural personality is characterized by a cluster of affective, attitudinal, and behavioral components. These components include emotional stability and wide-reaching empathic ability; secure racial, ethnic, and other identities; and a spiritual essence and sense of connectedness to all persons. Additional components of the multicultural personality include a self-reflective stance, cognitive flexibility, sense of humor, and commitment to social activism in fighting racism and other forms of oppression.

In elaborating on the multicultural personality construct, Ponterotto and colleagues integrated work from multiple specialties within psychology. Specifically, the definition of the multicultural personality draws on theory and research on racial and ethnic identity development and coping with cultural diversity from the fields of counseling and developmental psychology; the “tolerant personality” from social psychology; an expansionist theory of gender roles and feminist identity development from feminist studies; the universal-diverse orientation from social and counseling psychology; African-centered mental health from Afrocentric psychology; and expatriate adjustment in international contexts from organizational and cross-cultural psychology.

Table 1 summarizes these theoretical models. The first column lists the model of focus, the second column extracts key characteristics of the model as they relate to the multicultural personality, and the third column highlights instruments that have been developed to operationalize and test the constructs.