Nowadays, people live in a highly globalized and open world, interacting with different persons and facing various cultures. Openness to diversity is a willingness to interact with and understand people from different origins, ethnicity, races, ages, gender, and educational backgrounds. Individuals open to diversity are usually friendly, open-minded, listen to others, and accept personal differences. This trait becomes more and more important for the happy and peaceful coexistence of human beings. McCrae and Costa introduced the Five-Factor model, a famous taxonomy of personality traits, which describes and explains personality (Feist et al., 2018). It consists of five broad factors: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. This paper will focus on agreeableness as a vital factor that deals with willingness and readiness to meet social diversity.
The big five factors are universal and have bell-shaped dissemination. It means that most people score near the median, while only a few find themselves near extremes. Extraversion and neuroticism were found to be the most omnipresent and strongest personality traits (Feist et al., 2018, p. 391). In its turn, agreeableness deals with interpersonal warmth and cooperation. According to the scale, individuals who score low are unfriendly, distrustful, critical of others, and short-tempered. On the contrary, those scoring high disposed to be friendly, resilient, generous, trusting, and ready for cooperation with others.
People understand the diversity as being unlike others in qualities or nature (having differences). Kohli et al. (2016) listed three types of differences, including special features (individual level), consistent qualities (group level), and contrasting features (between groups). It is not easy to achieve intercultural competence due to its complexity and continually changing nature. Nevertheless, agreeableness helps people to deal with diversity by making others feel comfortable and appreciated in interaction. Such trait (its high score) contributes to enhanced communication and collaboration between individuals of different gender, physical abilities, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or age.
The ability to be agreeable leads to an emphatic understanding of people from different cultures. Han and Pistole (2017) revealed that people who scored high trust more in others’ good intentions and care more for others’ well-being (p. 761). Their further research proved that agreeableness is about general empathy that positively affects sympathy for culturally different people. It also has a strong association with openness to diversity. This trait works as a mediating mechanism reducing prejudice through interpersonal and intergroup contact (Han & Pistole, 2017). What is more, trust, compliance, modesty, especially altruism and tender-mindedness facets, lead to a greater open attitude toward diversity.
The Scripture also provides prominent examples of personalities who would have opposite results in terms of agreeableness. Jesus is depicted as someone kind, friendly, and open to everyone, while Satan is always antagonistic, evil, and intolerant. The Bible tells that the latter is a malicious liar, murderer (John 8:44), selfish (Acts 5:3), always wants to devour someone (Peter 5:8), and cause chaos (Genesis 3:1-5). These scriptures highlight Satan’s selfishness and suspiciousness that would find him scoring very low in the agreeableness factor.
Jesus denies self for the sake of others (Matthew 16:24), helps his disciples show his goodness (John 13:13-16), teaches his followers how to be equal, and dies for the sins of humanity (Peter 3:18). All these excerpts reveal Jesus as a generous, selflessness, and good-natured individual who would score very high in Costa and MacCrae’s Five-Factor Model. The latter can be a great example of an open attitude to diversity, while the Bible provides an essential guide for intercultural empathy. Overall, love, acceptance, and generosity are strongly associated with better intercultural cooperation, relations, and understanding.
References
Feist, J., Feist, G. J., & Roberts, T.A. (2018). Theories of personality (9th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
Han, S., & Pistole, M. C. (2017). Big five personality factors and facets as predictors of openness to diversity. The Journal of Psychology, 151(8), 752-766. Web.
Kohli, H. K., Ross, F., Kohli, A. S., & Peng, C. (2016). Universal-diverse orientation of business, education, and social work students in a north-eastern comprehensive university.International Journal of Management in Education, 10(2), 111-130. Web.