Here is a challenging question.

If one of the roles of a tester is to see the application you are testing from the viewpoint of another person, do those testers who come from a collective society shine brighter than those from an individual one?

According to Perspective tied to culture, researcher says from today’s National Post that very well might be the case. Here are some excerpts.

People raised in individualist cultures such as North America are less able to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective than people raised in collectivist cultures such as China, according to new research.

…found that Chinese players could instinctively imagine what their partner was seeing, whereas Americans “often completely failed to take the perspective of their partner.”

“Despite the obvious simplicity of the task, the majority of American subjects, (65%), failed to consider the director’s perspective at least once during the experiment,” according to the study. In contrast, only one Chinese subject made the same mistake, and only once.

I think this might have the greatest ramification when doing l10n testing. From a technical perspective it is easy and should have no impact, but one you get into the fuzzy contextually dependent testing you need to be able to superimpose yourself as someone from the test locale. If would seem that those of us who are highly individual and who were raised in individual cultures would be less effective at this.