Personality and Person Perception Across Cultures

Yueh-Ting Lee, Clark R. McCauley, Juris G. Draguns, Yueh-Ting Lee, Clark R. McCauley, Juris G. Draguns

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780805828139
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134808298
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Neither human nature nor personality can be independent of culture. Human beings share certain social norms or rules within their cultural groups. Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle held that man is by nature a social animal. Similarly, Xun Kuang (298-238 B.C.), a Chinese philosopher, pointed out that humans in social groups can not function without shared guidance or rules.

This book is designed to provide readers with a perspective on how people are different from, and similar to, each other --both within and across cultures. One of its goals is to offer a practical guide for people preparing to interact with those whose cultural background is different from their own.

I

Introduction

1

Why Study Personality in Culture?

Yuen-Ting Lee

Westfield State College,

Clark R. McCauley

Bryn Mawr College,

Juris Draguns

Pennsylvania State University,

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.

–Benedict (1934, p. 2)

In the late 1960s, Child's (1968) influential chapter in the Handbook of Personality Theory and Research raised the study of “personality in culture” to the status of a major field of personality research. Unfortunately, as we believe, the potential of this kind of work has largely slipped from view. The study of personality is flourishing, and cross-cultural research is burgeoning, but research that combines these two interests has been relatively sparse and scattered in recent years. This volume brings together a selection of what is new and interesting in cross-cultural study of personality; our goal is to reestablish the value of examining personality in a cross-cultural context.

We begin with a brief look at the concepts of personality and culture and the history of interest in their relationship. This interest is currently recovering after a long period of decline, and we point to some recent trends in research that we believe will further encourage the recovery. One weakness of current research on personality and culture is that it is dominated by North American issues and investigators. This volume aims to begin righting the balance, and we conclude our introduction by previewing the chapters contributed by a notably international group of investigators.

BASIC CONCEPTIONS OF PERSONALITY AND CULTURE

Defining personality is like defining human nature. It is both easy and difficult. On the one hand, it is easy because everyone understands what personality means without a definition. On the other hand, definitions are controversial. After reviewing 50 different definitions explicitly and implicitly related to personality, Allport (1937) was offered his own definition: “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustment to his environment” (p. 48).

Even this definition has not ended the attempts to capture the essence of the concept of personality within one defining statement. For instance, somewhat different from Allport, Funder (1997) defined personality as “an individual's characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms–hidden or not–behind those patterns” (pp. 1–2). For our purposes, what is noteworthy about both of these definitions is the emphasis on intrapsychic systems or mechanisms that make sense of individual differences in cognition, motivation, and behavior.

In line with this emphasis, Draguns (1975) pinpointed three major topics or concerns of personality research: individuality, consistency, and organization. To elaborate, personality theorists and investigators generally aim to answer the following three questions:

1. What is the nature of individual differences among persons?
2. What are the lines of consistency within a person, or what stimuli and/or situations are similar or equivalent from that person's point of view?
3. How are the various tendencies toward behavior hierarchically organized within a person? What are the priorities among the several potential patterns of behavior within that person? How are conflicts within the person reconciled or resolved?

All this helps to understand what personality is.

The concept of culture is at least as complicated as personality. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963) presented 150 definitions of culture in their book, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Although culture is defined in many different ways in cultural anthropology (e.g., Ember & Ember, 1985; Herskovits, 1948; Rohner, 1984) and in cross-cultural psychology (e.g., Brislin, 1993; Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga, 1990; Triandis, 1994, 1995), researchers seem to agree that culture is learned and shared by the members of a society. As Triandis (1994) put it, “culture is to society what memory is to individuals” (p. 1).

Perhaps the most concise definition of culture was proposed by Herskovits (1955): “Culture is the man-made part of the environment” (p. 305). This pithy statement encompasses both physical artifacts and mental processes, both machine and language, technology as well as etiquette, and architectural structures as well as psychological constructs. Within cross-cultural psychology, Triandis (1972) introduced the concept of subjective culture that specifically referred to the psychological and mental aspects of the human-made environment. Subjective culture has provided the vehicle for the way in which “people categorize experience, their ideas about correct behavior, the way they view other people and groups of people, and the way they value entities in their environment” (Triandis, 1994, p. 87). Subjective culture, in short, is the culture within people's minds, as both a reflection of, and a template for, their social environment.

Cultural anthropologists Ember and Ember (1985) also defined culture as the learned behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that are characteristic of a particular society or population and as the “shared customs of a society” (p. 166). Similarly, Keesing (1981) discussed culture as “the system of knowledge more or less shared by members of a society” (p. 509). Kottak (1991) stated that culture has the following features: “distinctly human; transmitted through learning; traditions and customs that govern behavior and beliefs” (p. 17). Moreover, according to Borofsky (1994) “definitions of the type Kottak and Keesing present above currently pervade the field” [i.e., anthropology] (p. 3).

Thus, personality and culture are both reducible to patterns of human behavior. Personality refers to an individual's characteristic pattern or enduring tendency of thoughts, feelings, and behavior; culture refers to the characteristic configuration of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors shared by members of a group. The origins of at least some aspects of personality may be seen as biological (Eysenck, 1982, 1990, 1995; Rushton, chap. 3 of this volume; Zuckerman, 1990, 1995), whereas culture is generally seen as entirely learned but based on the biological substrate that makes this learning possible. The study of personality explicitly includes the mechanisms that underlie the patterns of individual differences, whereas the study of culture is more often limited to describing the patterns or dimensions of characteristic behavior within groups.

And yet, human beings can be described as a culture-building species. No humans have ever survived and perpetuated themselves except as members of a social group. As Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) observed, “Man is by nature a social animal.” Similarly, Xun Kuang (also known as Hsun Kuang, 298–238 b.c), an ancient Chinese Confucian and Legalist philosopher, pointed out, “Humans cannot function without social groups which cannot exist without the shared guidance or rules of li (i.e., customary rules of living or norms of conduct) or yi (i.e., a combination of righteousness, faithfulness, fairness, justice, or morality).” Apparently, the ability to communicate and to transmit the social experience of a group (e.g., social norms and rules, li or yi) across generations is a biological given of the human condition. Thus, functioning and surviving in a culture are human species characteristics. At the same time, the spectrum of human cultures constitutes a virtually inexhaustible source of human variation in behavior, thought, emotion, and experience.

EARLY INTEREST IN PERSONALITY AND CULTURE: BROAD AND DEEP

The study of personality in culture has long been of interest to anthropologists and psychologists (Allport, 1937; Benedict, 1934; Ichheiser, 1949, 1970; Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948, 1953, 1965; Mead, 1928/1961, 1946; see Pervin, chap. 2 of this volume). In anthropology, an early classic in this area was Benedict's Patterns of Culture, which described both differences between tribal cultures and personality differences within a tribe. Despite Allport's contributions, however, personality and culture did not attract the attention of psychologists until Child (1968), a Yale psychologist, wrote his chapter on personality in culture for the Handbook of Personality Theory and Research. This landmark chapter gave brief attention to personality understood as the dynamics of beliefs, motives, and behaviors as an individual functions in daily life. Child then focused more specifically on personality understood as consistent individual differences in behavior. Child argued that the nature and origins of personality differences could be illuminated by cross-cultural study, and he reviewed a wide variety of relevant research to suggest the promise of such study in the future.

Child's chapter drew on decades of work on personality and culture. As McCrae, Costa, and Yik (1996) pointed out, “During the first half of this century, many of the best minds in the social sciences–Sigmund Freud, Bronislaw Malinowski, John Dewey, Erich Fromm, Margaret Mead, and Henry Murray among them–focused on the relations between personality and culture” (p. 189). Classic field work by early anthropologists such as Benedict (1934), Malinowski (1927), Mead (1928/1961, 1935/1950, 1953, 1956), and Sapir (1934) was followed up by later cultural or psychological anthropologists, for example, Honigmann (1954), Hsu (1948, 1954, 1972), Hunt (1967), Kaplan (1961), Kluckhohn (see Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948), LeVine (1973, 1974), Spiro (1951), and Wallace (1968). Hsu (1948), a student of Malinowski, did extensive work on Chinese personality and culture. Particularly noteworthy is Honigmann's (1967) book entitled Personality in Culture. In the same way, psychologists such as Allport (1937), Klineberg (1954), Murray (Murray & Kluckhohn, 1965), and Cattell (1949, 1982), and psychoanalysts such as Freud (1950), Jung (1959), Fromm (1941), and Erikson (1959) made important contributions to personality from a cross-cultural perspective. In brief, “personality and culture” was a lively field of research from the turn of the century well into the 1960s.

RECENT INTEREST IN PERSONALITY AND CULTURE: WEAK BUT RECOVERING

Unfortunately, research on personality in culture became marginalized almost to the point of disappearance in psychology in the 1970s and 1980s. The decline of interest in this topic may be attributed primarily to a Zeitgeist of behavioral and cognitive psychology, especially in the United States, which left little room for culture in its emphasis on (a) individuocentrism or individual-orientedness, (b) experimentalism, and (c) psychological reductionism or psychologism (Bond, 1988; Lee, 1994; Pepitone, 1989; Pervin, 1990).

Conceptual and methodological problems within the culture and personality enterprise also became apparent (also see Ichheiser, 1970; Kenny, 1994). Much of this work has rested on the implicit or explicit assumption that, within a culture, one mode of socialization experience prevailed and that it resulted in a single personality type, modal personality structure, or national character. In retrospect, this assumption appears simplistic. In any case, it proved untenable in the long run. Individual differences we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Basic Personality Differences Between Social and Cultural Groups
• Part III: Personality Across Cultures
• Part IV: Implications of Studying Personality and Person Perception in Culture
• Author Index
• Subject Index