Modal Personality

Modal personality was the term used by anthropologist Cora DuBois in her 1944 monograph The Peoples of Alor: A Social-Psychological Study of an East Indian Island, based on research carried out in the Alor islands of Indonesia during the late 1930s. The Alor study focused on issues and methods involving both anthropology and psychology. It was designed specifically to explore cross-culturally the potential for the existence of a basic human personality structure embedded in specific sociocultural settings and social–institutional structures. The academic quest was for an applicable statistical mode of analysis to be used in studying personality trait variance cross-culturally.

Methodologically, DuBois applied, tested, interpreted, and integrated standard culture and personality methods supplemented by then standard psychoanalytic testing methods. Many of the research concerns focused on in DuBois's fieldwork, regarding the structure of human personality, were addressed at seminars of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. This forum was headed by Freudian psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner, who had received training in Boasian anthropology. The challenge was to formulate psychocultural testing procedures and explanations in the search for the existence of basic personality differences and similarities while simultaneously exploring the potential for specific personality types linked to specific cultural institutional structures in varying cultures.

What developed from DuBois's fieldwork was the concept of a modal personality. Modal personality was defined in The People of Alor as “the product of the interplay of fundamental physiologically and neurologically determined tendencies and experiences common to all human beings acted upon by the cultural milieu, which denies, directs, and gratifies these needs very differently in different societies.” In other words, biology provides the physical backdrop for an innate personality structure that is then molded by specific cultural practices/institutions in the development of unique group personality types. Cultures then adapt to their surroundings through selected reinforced attitudes, actions, beliefs, and values based on the available basic human biological mental structure. Personality in and of itself was recognized as a biological given. Specific personality formulations were then conceived of as a product of the social structure of the community. DuBois assumed from the beginning that there existed a “psychic unity of mankind” or a template on which a society further designs, redesigns, and manipulates personality traits according to that culture's unique and varied needs. Specifically, DuBois studied the relationship of variations in early mother–infant interaction, care, and treatment and the effects on later personality development within the Atimelang people on the island of Alor.

The primary methodological assessment tools used by DuBois, as shown by William Manson in The Psychodynamics of Culture,included autobiographies, life cycle descriptions, personality development, and projective tests (e.g., Rorschach test interpretations, children's drawings, responses to the Porteus maze, word association responses). All were standard tests used in psychoanalytic studies at the time.

Dubois's research was backed financially and professionally by the Science Research Council of Columbia University (Ruth Benedict) and was supported by noted culture and personality anthropologists of the time (including Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson). The ongoing discussion seminars at the New York Psychoanalytic Society, run by Kardiner and others, formed the backdrop for presentations and interpretations of the ongoing research of DuBois and others. At the same time, Kardiner was developing his own theory of a basic human personality structure, later published in several different articles and texts. Kardiner's research into basic personality structure was described as an important milestone for both psychoanalytical and anthropological studies. This research was supported by other researchers such as Melton Singer, who commented that Kardiner's work was important because [Page 1604]it “combined both psychoanalysts and anthropologists into a new synthesis,” interpreted as providing the possibility of a crossing and/or blending of traditional disciplinary boundaries.

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