Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
What I'm saying is, haven't you ever looked at people's faces and found that sometimes people from a given nationality or ethnic group will often have what looks like the same facial model but with slight variations? Like: 'that face looks like a face I'd often see on a French person,' or 'that's a distinctly Chinese (as opposed to Japanese or Korean) face.' It's not to say that a handful of facial models typify entire ethnic groups, but that particular basic facial models are particularly associated.
I think I get what you mean.

Certainly the context-specific interrelationships between groups matter. A white/European-American child in that position would have barriers to assimilation due to the wider societal racial hierarchy. A (dark) black/African-American child could indeed grow up much like our subject D, though there would be an additional layer of influence from the prevalent African-American representation (not to say whether it's good or bad) in TV, film, and music that would be very difficult to conceal from a child even if living in a location with no other black people around.

I don't understand your framing of "second-best."
Koreans and Latin Americans can have similar skin tones, so in the absence of any relevant groups of Asians to join, a group of Latin Americans (or natives) would in practice be the group where his physical appearance would be the most similar to the other members.

I can't really argue with a gut feeling, but why? I have read people who live through poverty often display this kind of behavioral/psychological tendency, but what did you see in the video that left you with this judgement? Making and persisting with a risky business investment in a foreign country seems like contrary evidence.
I would like to emphasize that in the five-factor model, the starting point is not that the aspects of a person's personality that it describes tend to be heavily affected by a person's background (the model is not supposed to describe a person's personality exhaustively, at any rate). In theory, a preference for the same holiday destination every year is independent of your current and past wealth; though I suppose greater wealth could lead to more expensive habits. If you are very rich, maybe you'll take a cruise in your personal yacht to the same five destinations every year instead of sticking to just one destination. The key is a preference for doing the same rather than trying something new.

I also want to emphasize that the five-factor model does not operate with dichotomies; for every facet, most people fall somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, but it is easier to understand the facets by looking at the extremes.

Now for why I think he has that personality trait: one thing that really stood out, is the language. It is possible he has difficulty learning Korean, but my theory is that he doesn't really care to learn Korean, which would be consistent with a low score on this facet. His personal style, like the way he dresses, also seems a bit like he is stilling living his old life. Granted, if a person has been forced to live a very different life, they could try to hold onto something from their old life because it relates to their identity, even if they have a general preference for trying out new things.

He did say that he was a "little bit" excited to get out of his old lifestyle; but it also seems that this excitement was about leaving behind a life he didn't really enjoy rather than being excited at the prospect of moving to a new country and integrating into a new culture.

In personality theory, I think success is generally associated with the dimension of conscientiousness. The facet of ambition, which I mentioned above, belongs to this dimension. He could have scores that are average or above on some other facets of that dimension as well, such as self-discipline (cf. his reference to "hard work").