A challenge in decolonizing psychology is how to create culture-fair psychometric
instruments. Emic, bottom-up studies, can identify local constructs of interest, but it can be hard
to compare them across contexts. Etic studies use imported constructs to facilitate comparison.
But typically, etic models and inventories are developed in the West, then translated and
(minimally) adapted to other contexts. This is problematic for many reasons, for example,
reliability, validity, and variance are lower outside the West, and constructs of interest outside
the West are ignored. Here we took up the challenge to create an empirically-informed,
culturally-decentered personality inventory. The 'Cross-Cultural Big Two' model and its initial
item pool were based on commonalities among 11 emic lexical studies from around the globe.
Data used to refine the items also came from around the globe: Items were reduced based on
frequency of use in 11 corpora of 'World-Englishes', evidence from the Africa Long Life Study
(N = 2,958 18-year-olds from Namibia, Kenya, and South Africa), and from SAPA online data
from 13 English-speaking countries (N = 63,720). Psychometric exploration and comparison to external criteria in the ALLS and SAPA online samples were used to validate the Cross Cultural
Big Two Inventory, and comparison to the Big Five and several other Western Big Two
frameworks are provided. Finally, I share results using the Cross Cultural Big Two to assess
personality trait change over four years and explore its antecedent experiences in the Africa Long
Life Study samples. This effort has provided a culturally-decentered personality inventory,
optimized for comparison around the world. It is also presented as a creative attempt to develop
culture-fair instruments for use in psychological research, to spark ideas and discussion.