How does culture influence personality? Can personality influence culture? How? (1985)
Culture, in Edward B. Tylor’s classic definition (Primitive Culture, 1871), is the complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law and custom acquired by people as members of society. Personality is the individual’s enduring pattern of thought, feeling and action. The relationship runs both ways: culture moulds the typical personality of a society, while exceptional and ordinary individuals rework culture.
How culture shapes personality
- Configurations of culture. Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture, 1934) held that each culture selects a few traits from the human range and rewards them. The restrained, ceremonial Zuñi (“Apollonian”) and the ecstatic, rivalrous Kwakiutl (“Dionysian”) produced very different typical personalities.
- Culture over biology. Margaret Mead (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, 1935) found gentle men and women among the Arapesh, aggressive men and women among the Mundugumor, and dominant women among the Tchambuli. “Masculine” and “feminine” temperament was culturally patterned.
- Basic and modal personality. Abram Kardiner (The Individual and His Society, 1939) argued that primary institutions such as child-rearing, feeding and discipline create a basic personality structure shared by members of a society. Cora Du Bois (The People of Alor, 1944) replaced this with the statistical modal personality, the most frequent type.
- Status personality. Ralph Linton (The Cultural Background of Personality, 1945) showed that culture also assigns status-linked personalities, within one society.
- Recent evidence. Joseph Henrich and colleagues (2010; The WEIRDest People in the World, 2020) showed that traits psychology treated as universal, such as individualism and analytic thinking, are typical mainly of Western, educated, industrialised societies.
How personality shapes culture
- Charismatic innovators. Max Weber saw charisma as a revolutionary force that says “it is written, but I say unto you”. Prophets, reformers and leaders break old norms and found new ones, which are later routinised.
- Indian cases.
- Mahatma Gandhi turned fasting, spinning and non-violent resistance into a political culture of satyagraha.
- B. R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism with his followers at Nagpur in 1956 created Navayana Buddhism. Census 2011 counted about 8.4 million Buddhists, some 6.5 million of them in Maharashtra, largely a legacy of that decision.
- Creativity and deviance. George Herbert Mead’s spontaneous “I” means responses are never fully predictable. Artists, scientists and “innovators” in Robert K. Merton’s sense introduce new goals and means that can later become normal.
- Organisation of diversity. Anthony F. C. Wallace (Culture and Personality, 1961) argued that a society does not simply replicate one personality. It organises varied personalities, and his work on revitalisation movements showed stressed individuals reshaping whole cultures.
Limits of both claims
- The culture-and-personality school was faulted for stereotyping whole nations and for weak methods. Derek Freeman (1983) challenged Mead’s Samoan fieldwork.
- Great individuals succeed only when conditions are ripe. Gandhi’s methods drew on older Jain and bhakti ideals, and Ambedkar built on a mobilised Mahar community.
Conclusion
Culture and personality are mutually constitutive. For most people most of the time, culture sets the channels in which personality forms. At moments of crisis, gifted or dissatisfied individuals remake those channels, and that is how culture changes rather than merely reproducing itself.