National Personality Differences, Greece and England

I have been re-reading a 1978 paper on "National Differences in Personality: Greece and England" by E.C. Dimitriou and S.G.B.Eysenck, which contains the 101 question Eysenck Personality Questionnaire as an appendix.

It includes questions on people's attitudes towards insurance and safeguarding their future with savings and insurances, and on whether they lock up their houses carefully at night.

The Greeks responded very differently from the British, the Greeks not showing much approval of insurance policies in the 1970s.

"The explanation may be that Greeks do not believe in insurance due to their turbulent recent history (more than 10 coups and five wars in the past 25 years). (Statistics are available to the effect that per 1,000 people there are 2.77 insurance policies in Greece as opposed to 253.8 in England in 1968, the latest date for which statistics are available.)"

On the question of locking the house carefully at night, the responses again were very different between the British and the Greek samples.

"Here again national habits are quite different- in Greece very few people lock up their houses at night, security locks are almost unknown, and in any case during the long, hot summer, windows are almost invariably left open, nullifying any attempts to lock the house."


I wonder how different the results would be these days, if the same questionnaire were to be administered again.

There has certainly been a huge increase in the number of car insurance policies taken out in Greece (there are still around one million uninsured drivers, according to insurance brokers- roughly one in ten in Greece as against one in twenty in the UK). Attitudes towards saving to safeguard  the future must also have changed significantly. I suspect many more Greeks lock their doors and close their shutters at night.

Perhaps this is partly a result of globalisation?