Culture and Personality Revisited

Abstract

Recently, attempts have been made to employ American trait psychology across cultures. From the perspective of contemporary psychological anthropology, these efforts appear likely to repeat certain fallacies of the culture and personality approach of the 1930s, such as the reification of concepts into causal entities and the use of mean scores to characterize and compare populations (and even nations). These dangers are noted, and some recent developments in psychological anthropology are briefly discussed.