The Lonely Crowd in Minnesota: A Psychometric Approach to the Study of the Modern American Character

Abstract

The Historical study of the American character has been hobbled for several reasons, many of which are summarized by David Stannard in “American Historians and the Idea of National Character: Some Problems and Prospects.” Stannard emphasizes that America has always been too complex a sociocultural system to have produced a uniform national character or a typical personality. He notes that cultural anthropologists have not found psychological uniformity even in small, preliterate communities. If scholars would study the variety of the nation's psychological characteristics instead—if they would search for the modal personality (most frequently occurring type) and the distribution of other personality types rather than only the basic personality type—then, at least in Stannard's opinion, they would avoid oversimplification, the most serious conceptual error. But even this more realistic approach retains methodological problems that are so serious that he suggests historians concentrate on understanding “deeds and events” and leave the study of national character and characteristics to the social and behavioral scientists. (Philosophers of history might deny that the study of deeds and events is less troublesome than the study of national character, but that is another matter.)