How Do Culture and Personality Interact?
By:
THEODORE MILLON and
Seth Grossman
Carrie Millon
Sarah Meagher
Rowena Ramnath
Because
societies are composed of individuals and because every individual has a
personality, it follows that culture and personality are inextricably
intertwined. Their relationship has been studied by anthropologists,
psychologists, and other social scientists since the birth of these sciences.
American
anthropologists of the early 1900s saw culture as an extension of personality,
expanded physically and temporally to a larger scale. Some (Benedict, 1934;
Mead, 1928) argued that culture provides behavioral ideals that contextualize, and
thereby influence, the natural unfolding of temperament characteristics over the
course of maturation. Others (Kardiner, 1939) believed that society shaped a
basic personality structure guided primarily by child-rearing practices and
family organization Alarcon, Foulks, and Vakkur (in press) offer an incisive
review of this literature. More recent research has examined cultural
differences in the prevalence of personality disorders (Loranger et al., 1994).
Although some disorders appear to be more common in certain cultures than in
others, it nevertheless appears that all personality disorders have substantial
cross-cultural validity, occurring in nearly every culture with at least some
frequency.
Accordingly,
given the universality of the DSM
scheme of personality constructs and the
interpenetration of personality and culture mentioned previously, it should be
possible to generalize the constructs of a theoretical model of personality to
a cultural level (Escovar, 1997). The evolutionary model (Millon, 1990)
consists of three dimensions that motivate, prompt, energize, and direct human
behavior, anchored to three evolutionary imperatives— survival, adaptation, and
replication—that operate across all levels of organization in nature. Both
viruses and government, for example, must obey evolutionary laws.
The
first evolutionary imperative, survival, is expressed as a dimension of
pleasure and pain. Events that we subjectively experience as pleasurable are
those that contribute to the survival of the individual or species—sexuality,
for example. Events experienced as painful are associated with death, injury,
or disease. At a cultural level, malevolence versus benevolence refers to
differences in the extent to which pain versus pleasure is used as a motivator.
In some cultures, pain bestows absolution for previous transgressions, so
members of the culture view pain as a penance. Other cultures take the attitude
that individuals will intrinsically actualize in a productive direction if the
society will only provide support for basic needs, such as food, water, and
housing.
The
second evolutionary imperative, adaptation, is expressed along a continuum of
passive to active. Passive organisms seek to adapt themselves to their
environment, whereas active organisms seek to adapt the environment to their
own needs. At a cultural level, this distinction is expressed in the duality
between the preference for a more leisurely and traditional lifestyle and one
that is more industrious and dynamic. Societies thus differ in their rates of
social change; in the rate that they adopt innovations, technical or otherwise;
and in their level of relatedness to their environment.
The
third evolutionary principle, replication, is expressed as a sociobiological
duality between a desire to pursue one’s own self-interest and a desire to
nurture others. Some species produce many offspring that are left to fend for
themselves, a male strategy; other species produce only a few offspring, which
they nurture to adulthood, a female strategy. This duality has its counterpart
at a cultural level in the distinction between individualism and collectivism
(Triandis, 1995). In the collectivist culture, personal goals are subordinated
to those of the collective; in the individualistic culture, the views, needs,
and goals of the self are ascendant. Because every individual implicitly adopts
the values and standards of the larger culture at an unconscious level, the
type of culture in which he or she lives profoundly affects many aspects of human
functioning. Collectivist cultures emphasize intimacy and in-group relatedness;
the self is defined socially through its relations with others. In contrast,
individualist cultures emphasize independence; the self stands on its own apart
from the group, and not being able to do so is a sign of weakness. When it
comes to social interactions, collectivists value harmony, so much so that they
suppress negative feelings and “tell others what they want to hear, rather than
tell the truth and create bad feelings” (Triandis, 1994, p. 293). In contrast,
individualists seek to “tell it like it is,” emphasizing facts at the expense
of feelings.
References
Personality Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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