A blood type study in Taiwan To my surprise, I find a blood type study in
Taiwan!
Dr. Wu, the author, is a professor of medical college in Takao
prefecture, Taiwan.
Personality and Individual Differences 38 (2005) 797–808
Blood type and the five factors of personality in Asia
Kunher Wu, Kristian D. Lindsted, Jerry W. LeeAbstract
Research investigating the association of blood type with personality has yielded mixed results. Two recent studies (Cramer & Imaike, 2002; Rogers & Glendon, 2003) used inventories based on the widely accepted five-factor model and found no significant relationship between blood type and personality. Our study is the third published article to examine this relationship using the five-factor model. We analyzed 2681 Taiwanese high school students who completed the Chinese version of NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992a) and reported their blood type. An ABO blood group test was performed on a sub-sample of 176 students in the pilot study to assess the accuracy of blood type recall. Multiple linear regression analysis showed no significant relationship between blood type and personality except for Type AB females who scored lower on the Conscientiousness domain. MANOVA results showed that the combined dependent variables were not significantly affected by blood type or its interaction. We concluded that the potential effect seen in Type AB females on Conscientiousness might be a chance finding because of the small sample size (78). Academic achievement was positively related to Openness and negatively related to Extraversion. However, BMI was inversely related to Extraversion in females.
(c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Many references in this article are useful for us. By the way, Personality and Individual Differences magazine might like blood type, and I found another two articles.
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SummaryPersonality diagnosis by blood type is popular in Taiwan, as well as in Japan. Therefore about 2/3 of high school students think that there are (some) relationship between blood type and personalities, as well as Japan.
However, the most famous psychological test in English area NEO-PI-R's Chinese edition (of course, there is a Japanese edition, too) which is standardized globally, detected little significant difference except type AB females, even using more than 3,000 high school students' subjects.
I think it is strange because there is not fictiveness scale (in other words, the person him/herself tells a lie) in this personality test, so the personality that the person oneself is aware of -- in short, blood type's personality of the person oneself -- must be detected by the test.
# The situation is the same as in Japan. Few psychological tests detect differences of blood type, somehow.
It is said that NEO-PI-R psychological personality test has universality beyond languages, I may explain the past results (few significant differences appeared) without contradiction, including English versions!
The following is the explanation:
It is expected that significant differences must have appeared considerably, at least by individual answers (or the 30 facets). However, significant differences do not come out if individual answers are transformed to five personality scales. Therefore we might have to admit that NEO-PI-R test itself cannot detect the differences of blood type well, to explain the conventional data without contradiction.
Mr. Masahiko Nomi once said that psychological personality tests cannot measure the difference of blood type properly, and this might be right!
In addition, the NEO - PI - R's definition of personalities (ex: transformed by factor analysis etc.) are different from ordinary ones which we use everyday, It does not contradict to the conventional data.
Excerpts
Blood Type in Asia
In this article, blood type personalities in Asia are expressed. Item "Neuroticism" is mysterious here. Type B seems to be most nervous somehow. In Japan, type As are said to be most nervous. Why?
Our study is the first published article to examine the relationship between blood type and personality based on the five-factor model in Asia, where the belief that blood type determines personality is widely accepted. According to D'Adamo and Whitney (2001), more than 70% of Japanese believe that blood type is directly related to personality. In Taiwan, books discussing the influence of blood type on temperament and interpersonal relationships are readily available (Chang, 1999; Cheng, 1999; Lin, 1999).
Based on the literature and the popular beliefs in Asia, the following hypotheses were proposed:1. Blood Type B individuals will score higher on Neuroticism than will other blood types.
2. Blood Type O individuals will score higher on Extraversion than will other blood types.
3. Blood Type A individuals will score higher on Agreeableness than will other blood types.
4. Blood Type AB individuals will score lower on the Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness than will other blood types.
This is not fun for type AB persons, like me, anyway. :-p. But, seeing from a medical view point, type Bs are most likely to be obsessive-compulsive neurosis (in Japan), perhaps this may affect.
Characteristics of Taiwan
Then about subjects:
After obtaining permission from the city of Kaohsiung in March 2000 to conduct surveys in all of their 29 high schools, we used stratified random sampling to select participating classes from each school. We initially contacted 3844 11th grade students. We recruited students from the 11th grade because, unlike seniors, they would not be studying for the college entrance exam, and would still meet the age requirement for administering the NEO-PI-R questionnaire (age 16 years or older). Nearly 90% of potential participants (N = 3444) returned signed consent forms and were given the questionnaire.
Table 1
Distribution of gender, blood type, books, belief, and language separated by academic achievement level [abbreviated]
Males 1497 Females 1899 Type A 651 Type B 610 Type O 1282 Type AB 138 Books b Yes 2489 No 851 Belief c Yes 2175 No 1137 Language d Mandarin 1765 Taiwanese 1529 a Based on school enrollment, which depended on students' national test scores.
b Reponses to "Have you read any books about blood type and personality?"
c Reponses to "Do you believe there is a relationship between blood type and personality?"
d Language spoken at home.
The ratio of persons who have read books about blood type is as high as 75%, and that of having belief is 66%. We may think that the situation is almost similar to Japan.
I omit it here, but it seems that higher the ratio of Pekingese, the higher scholastic abilities. This tendency might come from the difference between Mainlander and Natives Taiwanese. I hope this does not affect the results....
In Taiwan, like South East Asia, type O prevails. And Kaohsiung City located the southern part of Taiwan, there seems to be more Os.
Results
Then I will write about an important result.
Table 2
Unstandardized regression coefficients with 95% CI for the blood types by gender on each of the five NEO-PI-R domains using the final multiple regression model ［confidence intervals are omitted］
Blood types
A B AB Males Neuroticism 0.9 -1.3 4.1 Extraversion b Belief c (Yes) 3.2 1.3 -2.9 Belief c (No) 3.8 -0.8 1.8 Openness 0.1 -0.6 0.2 Agreeableness b Belief c (Yes) -0.6 2.6 -4.4 Belief c (No) 2.4 1.0 5.9 Conscientiousness 0.2 -1.8 -0.1 Females Neuroticism -1.1 -0.5 1.8 Extraversion -0.2 -0.0 0.3 Openness -0.9 0.2 0.6 Agreeableness 0.1 0.5 -0.9 Conscientiousness 0.2 -0.6 -5.2* * P < 0.05.
a With blood type O as reference.
b The model included the interaction term between blood type and belief.
c Reponses to "Do you believe there is a relationship between blood type and personality?"
It is just what it looked. There is only one difference: type-AB girls' scores of conscientiousness are significantly lower than type-Os (level of significance 5%).
(March 18, 2007)
Last update: March 18, 2007.
