A Tight Spot: How Personality Moderates the Impact of Social Norms on Sojourner Adaptation

How do you navigate the norms of your new culture when living abroad? Taking an interactionist perspective, we examined how contextual factors and personality traits jointly affect sojourners’ adaptation to the host-country culture. We hypothesized that tightness (strong, rigidly imposed norms) of the host culture would be associated with lower levels of adaptation and that tightness of the home culture would be associated with higher levels of adaptation. Further, we proposed that the impact of tightness should be dependent on personality traits associated with navigating social norms (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and honesty-humility). We analyzed longitudinal data from intercultural exchange students (N = 889) traveling from and to 23 different countries. Multilevel modeling showed that sojourners living in a tighter culture had poorer adaptation than those in a looser culture. In contrast, sojourners originating from a tighter culture showed better adaptation. The negative effect of cultural tightness was moderated by agreeableness and honesty-humility but not conscientiousness.