Discuss the relationship between culture and personality
Discuss the relationship between culture and personality Culture : is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.
Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.
A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change.Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.
Personality: is defined as the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that evolve from biological and environmental factors. While there is no generally agreed upon definition of personality, most theories focus on motivation and psychological interactions with one’s environment. Trait-based personality theories, such as those defined by Raymond Cattell, define personality as the traits that predict a person’s behavior. On the other hand, more behaviorally-based approaches define personality through learning and habits. Nevertheless, most theories view personality as relatively stable.
The study of the psychology of personality, called personality psychology, attempts to explain the tendencies that underlie differences in behavior. Many approaches have been taken on to study personality, including biological, cognitive, learning and trait-based theories, as well as psychodynamic, and humanistic approaches. Personality psychology is divided among the first theorists, with a few influential theories being posited by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers.
Personality can be determined through a variety of tests. Due to the fact that personality is a complex idea, the dimensions of personality and scales of personality tests vary and often are poorly defined. Two main tools to measure personality are objective tests and projective measures. Examples of such tests are the: Big Five Inventory (BFI), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2), Rorschach Inkblot test, Neurotic Personality Questionnaire KON-2006, or Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R). All of these tests are beneficial because they have both reliability and validity, two factors that make a test accurate. “Each item should be influenced to a degree by the underlying trait construct, giving rise to a pattern of positive intercorrelations so long as all items are oriented (worded) in the same direction.” A recent, but not well-known, measuring tool that psychologists use is the 16PF. It measures personality based on Cattell’s 16 factor theory of personality. Psychologists also use it as a clinical measuring tool to diagnose psychiatric disorders and help with prognosis and therapy planning.
Personality is frequently broken into factors or dimensions, statistically extracted from large questionnaires through Factor analysis. When brought back to two dimensions, often the dimensions of introvert-extrovert and neuroticism (emotionally unstable-stable) are used as first proposed by Eysenck in the 1960s.
Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.
When used as a count noun, a “culture” is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes “culture” is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. “bro culture”), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.
Culture-and-personality studies, also called psychological anthropology, branch of cultural anthropology that seeks to determine the range of personality types extant in a given culture and to discern where, on a continuum from ideal to perverse, the culture places each type. The type perceived as ideal within a culture is then referred to as the “personality” of the culture itself, as with duty-bound stoicism among the English and personal restraint among traditional Pueblo Indians.
Culture-and-personality studies, also called psychological anthropology, branch of cultural anthropology that seeks to determine the range of personality types extant in a given culture and to discern where, on a continuum from ideal to perverse, the culture places each type. The type perceived as ideal within a culture is then referred to as the “personality” of the culture itself, as with duty-bound stoicism among the English and personal restraint among traditional Pueblo Indians.
Culture-and-personality studies
Culture-and-personality studies apply the methods of psychology to the field of anthropology, including in-depth interviews, role playing, Rorschach tests, elaborate biographies, studies of family roles, and dream interpretation. Most popular in the 1930s and ’40s, psychological anthropology is exemplified by the works of American anthropologist Ruth Benedict, especially Patterns of Culture (1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). Benedict and other proponents of culture-and-personality studies directed the attention of anthropologists to the symbolic meanings and emotional significance of cultural features that had hitherto been considered primarily through functional analysis; at the same time, they led psychologists to recognize the existence of an inevitable cultural component in all processes of perception, motivation, and learning.
Culture-and-personality studies lost traction in the 1960s and ’70s, an era characterized by shifting scholarly sensibilities and the critical reexamination of many fundamental anthropological concepts.
Relationship between Culture and Personality:
- Personality is a dynamic organisation within the individuals of those psychological systems that determine his unique adjustment to this environment.
Personality is a combination of both biological and socio-cultural characteristics. Definitely the personality has uniqueness but it does not mean that every individual is unique in every respect from others.
1(a) All the persons of a particular society have some common characteristics. In this context, the statement of Kluckhohn, Murrary and Schneider is important to note. They write “every man in certain respects is (a) like all other men, (b) like some other man, and (c) like no other men.
(a) A man is like all other men to the extent they have a common human biological heritage, which determines their responses to the enviornment.
(b) He is like some other men because he belongs to a cultural group and due to the fact that all other people of the group have been brought up in the same cultural milieu, his role performance will be similar to all other persons of the group but bot to the members of another group.
(c) A person is like no other man because the latter has not gone through exactly the same sequence of experiences, as has been the case with the former.
The above three situations of a person in the group reflect the relationship of an individual with his group in terms of the role of culture and biological heritage and efficiency in shaping the personality of an individual.
According to some sociologists, the development of personality and the acquisition of culture are not different processes, but one and the same learning process. The studies carried out in 1937 by Linton, the social anthropologist, and Kardinar, the psychoanalyst, demonstrate that each culture tends to create and are supported by a “basic personality type”.
In their view, the basic personality type found among most of the members of a particular society is the result of the culturally similar early childhood experiences, and not of instincts or inherent ‘drives’. The child is not born in a vacuum but in a cultural context which affects his mental make-up, habits and attitudes.
According to some sociologists, the development of personality and the acquisition of culture are not different processes, but one and the same learning process. The studies carried out in 1937 by Linton, the social anthropologist, and Kardinar, the psychoanalyst, demonstrate that each culture tends to create and are supported by a “basic personality type”.
In their view, the basic personality type found among most of the members of a particular society is the result of the culturally similar early childhood experiences, and not of instincts or inherent ‘drives’. The child is not born in a vacuum but in a cultural context which affects his mental make-up, habits and attitudes.
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