I do not for a moment think that my collaborators and I have studied every type of country, under all conditions of life, and over time. But we have studied several very different countries, under radically different conditions: Capitalist and socialist; under conditions of social stability and of extreme change; representing American, European, and Asian cultures. We have interviewed rigorously selected samples of employed men in all these countries, some of them in longitudinal studies, and the wives of these men or representative samples of women in some of the countries. (It would take 10 or 20 times the number of countries to be able to claim that we have studied every possible combination of factors, but I propose that in a long career, I have studied a diverse set of countries, with conclusions on which I base the following hypotheses for further examination.) I would be the first to acknowledge that further studies of more countries or at later times would lead to some modification of my hypotheses. But here is as good a start as I can offer at this time.

Now I want to review the many studies I have conducted of social structure and personality, not from the perspective of how I had seen the studies as we had conducted them at the time, but from the perspective of how they now appear – what these studies have contributed to our full understanding of the relationships between social structure and personality.

In particular, I want to review each cross-national inconsistency that we have found, to see how that discovery added to the total picture of how crossnational inconsistencies make us rethink the relationship of social structure to personality. I also want to consider whether each discovery matters for only one aspect of personality, particularly distress, or for several or even all aspects of personality that we have been able to study. And I will always be concerned with whether the culture of the country is American or European or Asian.

Before we ran into even the first instance of a cross-national inconsistency, we had focused on the United States.