Dissecting the surgeon's personality: cross‐cultural comparisons in Western Europe

Aim The surgeon's personality contributes to variation in surgical decision‐making. Previous work on surgeon personality has largely been reserved to Anglo‐Saxon studies, with limited international comparisons. In this work we built upon recent work on gastrointestinal surgeon personality and aimed to detect international variations. Method Gastrointestinal surgeons from the UK and the Netherlands were invited to participate in validated personality assessments (44‐item, 60‐item Big Five Inventory; BFI). These encompass personality using five domains (open‐mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and negative emotionality) with three subtraits each. Mean differences in domain factors were calculated between surgeon and nonsurgeon populations from normative data using independent‐samples t‐tests, adjusted for multiple testing. The items from the 44‐item and 60‐item BFI were compared between UK and Dutch surgeons and classified accordingly: identical (n = 16), analogous (n = 3), comparable (n = 12). Results UK (n = 78, 61.5% male) and Dutch (n = 280, 65% male) gastrointestinal surgeons had marked differences in the domains of open‐mindedness, extraversion and agreeableness compared with national normative datasets. Moreover, although surgeons had similar levels of emotional stability, country of work influenced differences in specific BFI items. For example, Netherlands‐based surgeons scored highly on questions related to sociability and organization versus UK‐based surgeons who scored highly on creative imagination (p