Personality In Culture

Personality is an inherent part of the human being. We know that it develops during childhood. But how does personality develop in culture?

According to Jahoda, among the Ashanti, when a boy is born (the same is not the case with girls), he is named after the day he was born. The name refers to the kra, the soul of the day. This implies disposition towards a certain type of behavior.

Those born on Monday are supposed to be calmer and more peaceful. Boys named Wednesday have a tendency for aggressive and impulsive behavior. An analysis by Jahoda of delinquency records in a juvenile court indicated a significantly lower number than expected among young men named Mondays.

There was also evidence that those called Wednesdays were more likely to commit crimes against other people (fights or assaults). Although the relationships were weak and replications of the studies may have been desired to establish the validity of the results, Jahoda’s conclusions seem to indicate that “the correspondences seem too important to be easily overlooked” (1).

How should we interpret these findings? Are they social stereotypes and prejudices that focus attention on minor (expected) crimes of certain young people more than others? Or, on the contrary, are social expectations internalized in some way by these young people, forming their personality?

Dimensional Models of Personality Traits

Personality is studied from personality traits. It is thus a question of looking for a set of traits that cover all the great aspects of individual-characteristic behavior. On the other hand, they are measured:

• Self-report or external observer personality questionnaires (for specific traits).

• Personality Inventories (omnibus instruments that cover a wide range of traits).

Thus, one of the most famous models for determining personality traits is the five-factor model (FFM) or the big 5. The inventory that is commonly used to analyze these five factors is the NEO-PI-R (Costa and McCrae, 1992). Its dimensions and its facets are :

• Extraversion : cordiality, assertiveness, gregariousness, activity, search for emotions and positive emotions.
• Neuroticism : anxiety, hostility, depression, shyness, impulsivity, and vulnerability.
• Cordiality : frankness, altruism, modesty, trust, honesty, sensitivity to others.
• Conscientiousness : competence, order, need for achievement, sense of duty, deliberation, and self-discipline.
• Openness to experience : fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions and values.

NEO-PI-R cross-cultural investigations

This inventory is used to measure personality. But is it universally valid? Several authors considered this and found that factor analyzes on national data sets show similar factors between nations.

It seems, therefore, that there is a universal structure around this inventory. Does this mean that the differences between cultures are invalidated? Can we say then that there is no relationship between culture and personality?

Furthermore, it appears that the difference in means between cultures is small compared to interindividual differences within a culture. Thus, the variability in the mean scores between countries is less than the intra-country means.

Personality in culture: The person in context

Author Julian Rotter coined the term locus of control. This American psychologist believed that an individual’s learning history can lead to widespread expectations. One can view a reward (positive or negative) as dependent on one’s behavior or as a contingent of forces beyond one’s control (internal / external control).

Thus, this concept of locus of control allows a more explicit role in the cultural context in the formation of personality than in trait theories.

The self in the social context

The self as a cultural product

The self is seen by many researchers, particularly in the US and East Asia, as a cultural product (2). For her part, the author Kağıtçıbaşı differentiated between the relational self and the autonomous self:

• The relational self : understood in “a family model of material and emotional interdependence.”
• The autonomous self : found in individualistic western urban settings with a “family model of independence.”

There is also the autonomous related self, which develops into an “emotional family model of interdependence. ” This can be seen especially in urban areas of collectivist countries.

Markus and Kitayama’s dichotomy between an independent self and the interdependent self

This dichotomy represents a large conglomerate of differences between East and West in emotion, motivation, cognition, and motivation. In the Western personality we can observe a model of person who is conceived as an autonomous, separate and atomized organism. It is made and manufactured with a range of skills, values ​​and motives, seeking separation and independence from others.

In the eastern model the person implies interdependence and relationships. It is not considered as a singular entity, but as tied to others. The person becomes “complete” when he is situated in his place in a social unit.

Thus, we can say that, depending on the place, the culture has more or less influence on the personality. Individualism also has a lot to do with this, marking the great differences between cultures.