Personality correlates of social axioms: Are beliefs nested within personality?

Many personality researchers have considered personality to be an integrated constellation of attitudes, values, feelings, beliefs about the self and behaviors, and most of the comprehensive personality measures reflect such a multifaceted conceptualization by including a mixture of items assessing these components. The present study examined the relationship between personality and beliefs about the world by using culturally derived yet universally applicable measures of personality and social beliefs—the Cross-Cultural Personality Assessment Inventory-2 (CPAI-2) and the Social Axioms Survey (SAS). It was found that the overlap between the CPAI-2 and the SAS was slight, suggesting that personality and beliefs about the world are two distinct multi-dimensional concepts, and that their overlap lies in self-assessments of personal control.