Impact of Culture on Personality

Impact of Culture on Personality

PSY 540

By

Ugo Ugoanusi

Cultural psychology is concerned with whether research findings generalize or can be extrapolated from one culture to another. Culture-free personality is a misnomer. People think about the world using languages and related communication systems acquired from culture and that are themselves the products of generations of cultural experiences. Shweder and Sullivan, 1990, cited by Pervin and Cervone, (2010), stated that culture and personality, "make (mark) each other up". There is no culture-free personality on the one hand and person-free culture on the other. Instead, there are persons who function psychologically by using cultural tools, including language and related meaning systems (Pervin and Cervone, 2010).

Our ways of being a person are not universal (Geetz, 1973). From Geetz's detail analyses of personhood within traditional culture on the Indonesian island of Bali indicate that the label people use to describe themselves is not unique, personal name. According to Geetz's study, personal names are treated as very private; "treated as though they are military secrets," he concluded. Bali people differentiate persons using labels that make reference to the individuals place within family and community systems. Geetz, noted that the Balinese, term for referring to people make reference to family members such as (a person is mother-of- Ugo), social status (which strongly defines how the person should be treated, or social role (for instance, village chief).

There may be variations from culture to culture in people implicit concept of self (Markus and Kitayama, 1991), cited by Pervin, and Cervone, (2010). Different cultures may feature different beliefs about the rights, duties, possibilities, and most central features associated with personhood. In European -American (sub) cultures, the self is primarily construed as independent. This perspective contrasts with the view of self found in East Asian cultures (Markus and Kitayama, 1991), or from subcultures in Igboland of Nigeria, where interdependence of self/ individual is conceived. In East Asian cultures, individuals are construes in terms of their roles with family and social relationships. The cultural system emphasizes the responsibilities inherent in one's position within these relationships, rather than highlighting the individual person's self-centered pursuit of happiness. Behavior is explained in terms of networks of social obligation.

When people move from one culture to another it affects them. Western cultures emphasize social practices, asserting one's personal attributes. Someone from Eastern culture engaging in these new social practices should cause them to become more extraverted, as they adapt into this new culture. Bicultural individuals live long enough in two different cultures to internalize their belief systems.

The United States' tradition of welcoming immigrants predates independence. Slaves for farm plantations in the south and mining labors throughout the country was on-going but the war for independence and the abolition of dehumanizing human trade by Abraham Lincoln reversed the order. The Germans, the Irish, the Italians were known to have moved en masse to the nascent nation to take up labor positions they could not find in their home countries. In the 19th century western Europeans were known to have immigrated to USA to escape from religious, political persecution and to get employment; the result is today's Irish-American, Italian-America subcultures in USA. USA's open door system to immigrants is receiving press and citizen's attention as the sitting government tries to stem or reverse a policy on whose strength, diversity, cheapness, and drudgery, the country was built.

Globalization and the ease of movement cross boundaries has raised the issue of immigration to pre-potent scales. A country like Britain that used to export people