Cultural Types Theories

Culture and Personality

The academic concept of cultural types first appeared in the early 19th century, likely based on existing ethnocentric cultural prejudices between peoples of newly emerging nation-states. The cultural types notion suggested a relationship between upbringing in a culture and the character and personality of its people. Traditional religious concepts had been accepted for centuries as explanations of adult behavior, based in part on the idea of karma, the summative moral result of past behavior, or the soul, granted to the child by a higher power before birth. The academic study of culture and personality attempted to understand personality development and its relationship to the social environment in which it developed.

[Page 277]The emerging fields of anthropology and psychology approached the explanation of behavior independently for most of the 19th century until Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis provided a potential bridge between them. Charles Darwin's theories became a strong influence on each of the social sciences, and the newly conceived differences proposed between human cultures were classified by some anthropologists according to their presumed level of development along an evolutionary scale, from primitive to civilized. Anthropologists searched for common features of personalities in a given culture that might allow the characterization of peoples by their cultures. Generalizations were sought about each culture, such as national character, modal personality types, and particular personality configurations.

Other anthropologists, led by Franz Boas and his students Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, developed a position arguing for the equivalence of humans and their social institutions across cultural groups. By the second decade of the 20th century, Sapir was integrating work from his linguistic studies with concepts relating psychology and psychotherapy to cultural anthropology, suggesting that all members of a culture possess related personalities and that these can be subanalyzed into types. This greatly expanded the new culture and personality approach, shifting thinking from the presumed evolution of cultures toward the importance of the individual, arguing that culture assumes the character and form of its members' personality structure.

Much of this thinking was influenced by Boas's and Benedict's work on Native American cultures. Boas defined culture as a collection of individuals with their own institutions and societies, introducing the modern definition of culture, and rejected a hierarchy of cultures. This work patterned culture at an individual level, seeking the source of individual differences in behavior and the meaning attached to the variations, opening a wider discussion between anthropologists and psychologists culminating in the 1920s and 1930s.

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services employed both Benedict and her student Margaret Mead in a U.S. Army-Motivated project to understand the culture of the enemy, particularly the Japanese. Conducted by Benedict and designated as a study of national character, the research was necessarily based on existing written accounts together with interviews of Japanese Americans, and published after the war. The Office of Strategic Services expanded the national character studies directed by Benedict and Mead as a preemptive attempt to understand different countries and the threats they might pose. Mead's main work was for the Committee for National Morale, to apply anthropology and psychology to the issue of building American morale.

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