Culture, Behavior, and Personality

An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Psychosocial Adaptation

Robert A LeVine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351524223
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This new edition of Culture, Behavior, and Personality is organized into ve parts. Part I de nes the eld of inquiry, Part II presents a critical review of existing theories and methods, Part III expounds LeVine's unique Darwinian model of culture and personality, Part IV deals with the strategies and methods with which to study individual dispositions within the sociocultural matrix, Part V concludes with two essays on cultural and personality research including new advances and avenues of research that have appeared within the last seven years.

Part I
Introduction: The Comparative Study of Personality and Sociocultural Environments

1

Basic Questions for Culture and Personality Research

Culture and personality research is the comparative study of the connections between individuals (their behavior patterns and mental functioning) and their environments (social, cultural, economic, political). This broad field could be assigned a more compact label such as psychosocial studies or broken down into disciplinary components such as psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology and trans-cultural psychiatry. I prefer culture and personality because, as the original term for this interdisciplinary area, it emphasizes the continuity between the pioneering work of its founders some 40 years ago and the conception of the area presented in this book. The important questions they identified in the borderlands between psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences remain the defining characteristics of the field and set the course for contemporary theory and research.

The terms culture and personality have acquired such diverse meanings in common speech and scientific discussion that it is necessary to indicate at the outset what I mean by them and related terms. In anthropology, culture is an omnibus term designating both the distinctively human forms of adaptation and the distinctive ways in which different human populations organize their lives on earth. Humans are seen as having a common set of adaptive goals, many of which they share with other animals, but as having the unique capacity to achieve them through acquired behavioral characteristics (patterns of culture) that can vary widely from one population to another. At this level of discourse, culture is often defined against the background of the physical and biological environment to which a human population must adapt in order to survive. But culture can also be seen as constituting an environment for members of a population, and it is in this sense that the term is used here. The individuals in a human population do not adapt directly and simply to their physical and biological environment but to the cultural (or sociocultural) environment that includes means for their individual survival and guides their adaptation along established channels. I use the term culture to mean an organized body of rules concerning the ways in which individuals in a population should communicate with one another, think about themselves and their environments, and behave toward one another and toward objects in their environments. The rules are not universally or constantly obeyed, but they are recognized by all and they ordinarily operate to limit the range of variation in patterns of communication, belief, value, and social behavior in that population. Grammatical rules, for example, are constraints on acceptable speech patterns, tending to restrict utterances to certain channels. Other forms of communication are similarly restricted by explicit and implicit rules and so are patterns of interaction between persons (in groups and other social situations), and beliefs about the worlds of outer and inner experience.

Sociocultural environments are complex and variable; their most stable features can be called institutions. When a pattern of behavior, belief or communication is accorded such legitimacy in a population as to assume the status of a rule recognized by all, it is institutionalized. This means performance in accordance with the rule is recognized as correct (given positive social sanction), while deviation from it is recognized as incorrect and may bring other negative social sanctions. The institutionalization of such a rule, or norm, thereby puts pressure on individuals in a population to standardize their social performance. Norms concerning individual response to a specific type of situation are governed by larger institutionalized programs for collective action (institutions) directed toward adaptive goals, for example, economic institutions, religious institutions, political institutions. These programs are realized through institutional structures, stabilized aggregates of persons interacting according to normative prescription, with each person responding to the prescriptions defining his institutional role. From the viewpoint of the individual, his sociocultural environment is made up of situations, roles, and institutions that represent normative pressures on him for correct performance and also offer opportunities for personal expression and satisfaction.

Personality is used here in two distinct but related senses similar to those discussed by Irvin L. Child:

In the first meaning, personality refers to the complex psychological processes occurring in a human being as he functions in his daily life, motivated and directed by a host of internal and external forces . . . .

The other and narrower meaning of personality refers to a more restricted subject matter within this wider range—to the internally determined consistencies underlying a person’s behavior, to the enduring differences among people insofar as they are attributable to stable internal characteristics rather than to differences in their life situation. . . . Personality, in this sense, consists of all those more or less stable internal factors that make one person’s behavior consistent from one time to another, and different from the behavior other people would manifest in comparable situations (1968, pp. 82-83).

To put the first meaning somewhat differently, we might say that personality is the organization in the individual of those processes that intervene between environmental conditions and behavioral response. If individuals responded uniformly to all environmental conditions, as motorists do to traffic lights, we could safely ignore such processes in the prediction of social behavior. In fact, however, individuals respond so differently to so many aspects of the human condition (e.g., birth, death, pleasure, pain, stress, anger, growing up, aging) and to so many of the pressures and opportunities in their cultural environments, that we are forced to take account of the intervening processes that must be involved in producing these differential responses. These processes include perception, cognition, memory, learning, and the activation of emotional reactions—as they are organized and regulated in the individual organism. The individual’s mental processes, distinctively organized toward the goals of self-regulation and social adaptation, lead him to respond to environmental stimulation with distinctive patterns of responses.

A full understanding of the processes involved in personality in this broader sense will eventually include more complete knowledge of the biochemistry of the central nervous system than is presently available, not to mention the myriad connections between neurophysiology and behavior. At present, we can at least bear in mind three types of processes: (a) those intervening between an immediate situational environment and an evoked response, as in emotional arousal or cognitive problem-solving; (b) those intervening between environmental conditions experienced by the individual early in his life and his behavior at a later stage, as in memory, learning, and the developmental processes of ontogeny; (c) those intervening between the environmental conditions of the breeding population or the human species as a whole, long before the individual was born into it, and his own innate endowment for behavioral functioning, as in the phylogenetic process of natural selection. These three types can be seen, in reverse order, as a hierarchical series of constraints, each setting limits on the behavioral possibilities of the next. Thus human evolution provides the genetic constraints within which ontogeny takes place, and the latter limits the range of behavioral response to life situations. Adaptation, the shaping of the organism’s response potentials toward fit with environmental conditions, goes on at all three levels, and the personality of the adult individual is the product of this complex series of adaptive processes.

This broad conception of personality, then, involves theoretical models of mental functioning and development, positing the operation of mechanisms and processes that go beyond what can be empirically demonstrated by psychological investigation to date. Personality in the second, narrower, sense, however, is based on observing behavior rather than theorizing about process. It is generated from the observation of consistencies in the behavior of the individual, consistencies across diverse situations in his life at one time as well as across diverse periods in his life. The trans-situational and enduring qualities of these behavior patterns or personality traits suggest that they are properties of the individual rather than of particular situations or developmental phases in his life.

The definition of units of behavioral consistency is quite arbitrary, since individual behavior in this directly observable sense has no inherent boundaries in time or space. Is a person to be termed “irritable,” “hostile to same-sex peers,” or simply “aggressive”? It depends on who is observing him, the kinds and number of situations in which he was observed, and the amount of time devoted to observation. It also depends on the terminology favored by the observer. Faced with this arbitrariness, psychologists have tended to ground personality trait descriptions in the folk terminology of Anglo-American culture, using adjectives by which ordinary persons categorize each others idiosyncratic behavior patterns (e.g., sociable, dependent, aggressive, domineering, suspicious), though giving them more precise and explicitly operational definitions. Traits so defined are widely variable among individuals in our own population and appear to vary greatly across culturally diverse populations as well, but evidence concerning such variation is only as valid as the comparability of the situations in which the individuals were observed. Despite problems of comparison and cultural bias, however, it seems highly probable that every culture gives recognition to trans-situational, enduring behavioral consistencies of the individual in its vernacular terminology and that both behavioral consistency within an individual and variability between individuals are universal in human populations. Although there is little agreement about which dimensions of individual behavior form the most important consistencies and variations for scientific research, it is obvious that many dimensions recognized in ordinary speech and personality psychology alike are highly relevant to participation in the sociocultural environment.

In referring to “internally determined consistencies underlying a person’s behavior,” Child indicates another aspect of personality in the second sense: that behavioral consistencies reflect or express dispositions that are not themselves directly observable but are in some sense “internal” to the individual. The disposition is a potential for behavior that is conceived of as existing even at times when it is not being realized in observable behavior. As a stable characteristic of an individual organism, it is also conceived of as functioning for that individual, contributing somehow to his internal workings. These conceptions are more than theoretical postulates; they have roots in the observation of behavior. Individual behavior patterns give evidence of being dispositions by their insistent repetitiveness, intruding themselves into diverse situations even when other behavioral options appear readily available, and surviving even under a variety of unfavorable conditions. Suppose, for example, we observed a man reacting in an irritable way to his wife, castigating her for some apparently minor act that he interpreted as an attack upon himself. Later, the following observations are added: (a) He does this to his wife frequently, not only at home but in situations outside the home, (b) He behaves in this way not only to his wife but also to his secretary and, in fact, to a succession of secretaries who have worked for him. (c) He has occasionally done this in situations where it would be observed by others and regarded as socially unacceptable behavior, (d) When he was in military service, no incidents of this kind appeared for two years; on being reunited with his wife, however, the behavior pattern soon reappeared. (e) When his wife left him, he reported feeling very disturbed at being alone and soon found another woman with whom he repeated the same pattern of irritable behavior. These observations suggest a behavior pattern that is not only repetitive and consistent but also sufficiently durable to reappear after prolonged absence, sufficiently “driven” to defy potential social censure, and sufficiently important to the individual for him actively to seek to reinstate the conditions of its activation when they were withdrawn. On such grounds I, and many personality psychologists, would conclude that we had been observing the manifestations of a stable disposition that acts as a pressure on and influences the individual’s behavioral adaptation, including his selection of environments, and that plays a part in the maintenance of his sense of well being. Assuming the existence of such a disposition makes the individual’s behavior predictable and comprehensible, it also suggests an internal psychological organization in which that disposition is functionally embedded. In making this assumption, then, we are saying that the observed behavioral consistencies do not constitute personality, they are indicators of it, or rather of the internal dispositions that influence overt behavior.

The more elaborate and detailed one’s assumptions about the internal psychological organization in which personality dispositions are embedded, the farther one moves toward personality in the first sense, as psychological process, and away from a strictly behavioral definition. There are many differing views about how much organization and structure to assume in personality, particularly about whether personality can be approached as a set of separate (or separable) dispositions or must be seen as a functioning whole and about whether dispositions should be conceptualized as needs operating in a psychic economy or system of equilibrium (see Maddi, 1968). In the present state of knowledge and methodology, I prefer to operate with a set of minimal assumptions that do not preclude a more elaborate conceptualization: that personality dispositions operate as pressures on individual behavior, as cultural norms do, but from within; that each disposition manifests itself in the individual’s goal-seeking behavior, emotional reactions, cognitive activity (perceiving, associating, conceptualizing, remembering, problemsolving, learning), and communicative behavior—all of which are observable; that the imperative quality of the disposition indicates that it is functionally related to the maintenance of a psychological organization that is internally as well as environmentally adaptive and that has a history of its formation in the life of the organism; that dispositions can and should be compared across individuals and groups, with awareness of their possible varying significance in differing psychological organizations (which require comparative study in themselves). These minimal assumptions constitute the provisional concept of personality with which we can begin this book.

Some may ask: Why not remain at the level of behavior? Why deal with unseen entities of psychological organization? The answer is that just as the field experience of anthropologists provided an intuitive basis for viewing culture as an institutional organization rather than an assortment of unrelated traits, so the clinical experience of students of personality makes the assumption of psychological organization plausible. Returning to the example offered above, we could term the man’s behavior pattern “hostility toward women” and leave it at that. A clinical approach, however, would take the imperative quality of this pattern as an indicator of something more and might discover that this man had excessive expectations of the women in his life, believing unrealistically that they would take care of him as he wanted to be taken care of and then reacting with anger when they did not. The desire to be taken care of by woman would come into focus as the primary disposition, accounting for his seeking to reinstate relationships that seemed to irritate him and for his unhappiness when such irritations were removed from his environment. It might also be discovered that his unrealistic expectations of women had a long history in his life, beginning with relations with his mother at a time in childhood when he was cognitively immature and lasting long afterward. In other words, it might point to a developmental history in which the conditions surrounding its formation might be identified. Furthermore, shifting focus to his unrealistic expectations of women might make it possible to understand that in his third marriage he found a woman whose behavioral style afforded him enough satisfaction of those expectations to reduce his observable hostility to women, at least in the conjugal relationship, while leaving the underlying disposition unchanged. This kind of deeper understanding of individual behavior, with its actually greater range of coherence and its potentially greater predictive and postdictive power, is not possible without assuming that dispositions are organized in the individual.

Another illustration can be offered from the realm of work and achievement. Two men are highly successful in their occupations due to a combination of competence, careful planning toward long-range goals, moderate risk-taking, and a great deal of hard work. They could both easily be rated high on the psychological dimension of n Achievement (achievement motivation, the desire to compete with a standard of excellence). One of them, who might be Japanese, believes that he works to please his mother and to make him feel worthy of the sacrifices she made for his educational success and to increase his family’s social esteem. The other believes that he works to achieve acclaim for himself from others, regardless of who they are, that this desire for personal recognition keeps him going in his job and makes his work an overwhelmingly important part of his life. These self-interpretations suggest that the same behavior pattern of achievement motivation might be embedded in different personality organizations in these two men and have differing subjective significance for them. While it is true that both are high in achievement behavior and the achievement motive, they probably have different work styles, different ways of integrating work with family relations in their lives, and different preferences in working conditions. When one tries to predict from their contemporary success and high motivation, either forward to their possible reactions to technological unemployment or retirement, or backward to their formative experiences, the different personality organizations in which their n Achievement is embedded are likely to assume primary importance as a basis for prediction and explanation.

We cannot do without the assumption that personality dispositions are organized in the individual and have functional roles in that organization. This does not mean we have to give up the concept of personality as behavioral consistency. Indeed, the most ambitious and comprehensive theory of personality, psychoanalysis, is based on an attempt to relate individual behavior as observed in clinical detail to a complex model of personality organization. The present model, based on the assumptions stated above, is much simpler, because I hope we can discover how dispositions are organized rather than anticipating it theoretically. I distinguish three levels: the o...