The Impact of Culture on Personality: A Detailed Analysis

Personality and culture are closely connected, as a person’s cultural background, among other things, significantly influences their personality development.

The connection between personality and culture is explored by an anthropological field of study commonly referred to as psychological anthropology. It acknowledges that different cultural influences, such as environment and exposure to other cultures, impact people’s opinions, beliefs, and values.

In this article, we’ll explore the cultural influence on personality through the dynamic interchange between personality and culture, focusing on how diverse cultural factors contribute to personality development.

What Is Personality, and How Is It Developed?

Personality is a complex concept encompassing a person’s temperament, behavior, character (defined by moral codes and core beliefs), and preferences, to name a few. It’s not genetically predisposed but rather a dynamic dimension that develops and evolves over time.

In addition to temperament and character, an individual’s personality involves a variety of other traits, including the following:

Extraversion or introversion
Optimism or pessimism
Creativity
Confidence

As per Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, personality has three elements, as follows:

Id. This part involves unconscious and instinctual traits and doesn’t depend on experience, meaning it’s the same as temperament.
Ego. This element expresses the id's impulses and develops between birth and the age of three.
Superego. This component represents an evolution of the ego. It emerges between the ages of three and five. The superego controls impulses and comprises the ideal self and conscience.

According to Freud, these components develop through pleasure-principle identification, which has five stages that are further defined in Freud’s psychosexual development theory. Freud proposes that a person needs to overcome the challenges of one phase to progress to the next one. Otherwise, he believed, they could develop a personality disorder later in life.

In addition to Freud’s, there are a few other widely known theories on personality development, including:

Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
Theory on 16 personality types
Big 5 personality theory
DiSC personality types

Personality develops as we age, and it’s affected by various factors, such as:

Family environment
Heredity
Socialization
Culture

Most of these factors are variable, so it’s unsurprising that personality can significantly change throughout life. Depending on a person’s life experience, their beliefs, opinions, and standards may slightly shift as they age, albeit not significantly.

These changes are emphasized by the fluctuations within their cultural group. As social beings, people adopt and develop traits that are seen as desirable in their community, evolving along with societal cultural standards.

In the following text, we’ll elaborate on the influence of culture on personality, focusing on cultural dimensions and other related factors.

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The role of culture in shaping personality is significant, as cultural beliefs, values, and practices greatly influence how a person perceives themselves. Thus, it directly forms their concept of self, thus shaping their cultural identity, standards, and roles within their community.

The differences in personalities across countries aren’t surprising. Namely, cross-cultural psychology proposes that each culture prioritizes specific behaviors and personality traits, resulting in variations in personality.

A particular culture's desired behaviors and personality traits depend on its norms, values, and traditions. They influence an individual’s upbringing, socialization, and, by extension, their belief system and values.

Simply put, personality traits valued and encouraged within a certain community often reflect an individual’s personality. Therefore, personality and culture are intertwined, as you can relatively easily presume which traits a person may have depending on their cultural background and vice versa.

Let’s see how culture shapes personality in three simple examples:

In a culture that encourages values such as modesty and humility, people often display traits associated with them, such as being reserved.
If a culture places a high value on achievement and competitiveness, individuals within it are likely to display personality traits such as assertiveness and ambition.
In a culture that emphasizes social harmony, people may exhibit traits such as empathy, cooperativeness, and an inclination to compromise.

According to Hofstede's theory on cultural dimensions, people from different cultures prioritize and express certain behaviors and traits differently.

Let’s explore how culture affects personality depending on those prioritized values and behaviors within different cultural groups.

Depending on whether a society emphasizes individualism or collectivism, the people within it express different traits.

Individualistic cultures like those in the West prioritize autonomy, independence, individual achievement, and personal freedom. They highlight that a person should be able to achieve their goals and solve their problems on their own without relying on help from others.

On the other hand, collectivist societies such as those in Eastern countries emphasize cooperation and social harmony. People within them will likely reach out to family and friends for help and support during difficult times.

Power distance is the extent to which people within a certain cultural group value equality. According to Carl Nassar, PhD, inequality exists in all cultures. However, there’s a difference between cultures with high andlow power distance indexes.

Cultures with a low power distance index have a relatively even power distribution. While they understand that inequality is sometimes inevitable, they strive for relationships to be as balanced as possible in terms of equality.

Meanwhile, cultures with a high power distance index have inequality as the basis of their societies. Within them, the few hold power over the majority.

Uncertainty avoidance is a cultural group’s tolerance level for uncertainty about the future. Although people all over the world must deal with this phenomenon, regardless of their cultural context, different societies have different points of view on it.

Cultures with low uncertainty avoidance have a more relaxed perspective on the future, while those with high uncertainty avoidance prefer to rely on structures and set rules to deal with the uncertainty of the future.

This distinction is interesting, as it’s reminiscent of the difference between perceiving and judging personality types. While perceiving types are spontaneous and prefer to go with the flow, judging types value order, structure, and routine.

This cultural dimension examines whether a certain cultural group is oriented toward long-term or short-term gain. Namely, certain cultures give up on short-term rewards in favor of long-term benefits, prioritizing values such as saving, persistence, and patience.

Meanwhile, other cultures, predominantly those in Western countries, forego long-term gains in favor of short-term rewards in the present. These groups emphasize the importance of quick results and immediate gratification.

Culture shapes our identities primarily by passing on shared beliefs and values from one generation to the next through cultural practices and socialization.

These beliefs and values create the foundation for our view of ourselves as well as others, including cultural norms concerning family, gender, religion, and social status. All these components impact our sense of identity and relationships with others within our society.

Culture also shapes identity through cultural identity formation, developing a sense of connection and belonging to a particular group. Cultural identity involves several elements, including behaviors, opinions, and preferences regarding language, music, food, and traditions.

Yet another way culture shapes individual identity is through cultural practices, which offer a sense of unity within a community. These include different artistic forms of expression, whether through music, dance, or art; they fortify cultural identity and act as channels for conveying both individual and collective beliefs and values.

Lastly, culture has a significant impact on personal experiences, which is also a way in which it contributes to shaping individual identity. Namely, both positive and negative experiences an individual has with their culture can have a long-term effect on their place within the community and society, as well as their sense of self.

These experiences may include marginalization, discrimination, and oppression, and they can create a sense of isolation from the mainstream culture. On the other hand, experiences of cultural celebration and pride can enforce a person’s sense of belonging to their community and sense of identity.

The connection between personality and culture goes beyond the influence an individual’s cultural group has on their personality. Specifically, exposure to different cultures has just as significant an impact on people’s values, opinions, beliefs, and behaviors.

That impact can have different effects. As globalization brings people from different cultural backgrounds together, some embrace diversity, while others choose the opposite way, turning their backs on it.

On the one hand, multicultural exposure can provide an individual with diverse perspectives, enhance their creativity, and reduce stereotypes about differences among people. On the other hand, it can strengthen intergroup biases and their already rigid thinking style.

For example, when the Iron Curtain collapsed, the countries of the former Soviet Union suddenly opened up to Western cultural influence after having been completely isolated from it. Traditions, behaviors, music, art, and media suddenly surged into Eastern Europe, creating somewhat of a culture shock.

As a result, some people welcomed this cultural diversity, learning from it and incorporating it into their lifestyles. This openness ranges from listening to Western music to learning the English language and has resulted in a change in some of their personality traits, such as extraversion, assertiveness, and conformity.

Others, however, disapproved of Western cultural influence, reinforcing their prejudices and rigid thinking style.

The difference between the two can arguably be attributed to the differences between personality factors other than the culture that shaped their personalities.

Cultural awareness is highly important for many reasons and affects our lives and communities. Let’s see what they are and how cultural awareness positively influences the lives of individuals and collectives alike.

Cultural awareness directly influences personal growth. Specifically, being open to other cultures is a great way to gain new knowledge and perspectives. It also enhances curiosity, bringing more learning opportunities and experiences, broadening your horizons, and developing critical thinking due to the absence of bias.

Openness to cultural diversity can also provide new ideas and even inspire you to reach your goals, offering a new point of view on them.

The personal growth resulting from cultural awareness enhances an individual's overall quality of life. It improves their interpersonal skills, which can lead to further development in both the personal and professional aspects of their lives.

Personality and culture are closely connected in the professional environment of an individual as well as a collective. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that cultural awareness benefits an individual’s professional life and their community’s workforce situation alike.

For example, if you have valuable academic or work experience with different cultures, stating it in your CV writing can increase your chances of getting a particular job.

Knowing multiple languages is the most obvious way to showcase cultural awareness in a professional environment. It makes you more employable across cultures, offering more valuable cross-cultural experiences.

In a broader sense, cultural awareness contributes to workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also encourages creativity and innovation while improving profitability and efficiency.

Therefore, exposure to diverse cultures positively influences both personality and cultural awareness.

Cultural awareness is directly proportional to self-awareness, which is closely linked to personality and culture. Since culture influences one’s sense of self and personality, cultural awareness can positively affect the development of personality and culture.

Simply put, when we know ourselves well, we can connect with people better and vice versa. Engaging with diverse cultures enhances a person’s sense of self, offering numerous new perspectives and opportunities for personal development.

Moreover, self-awareness makes an individual more open to meeting people from diverse cultures and helps them understand their ways.

Exposure to different cultures can indirectly lead to improvements on a global level. Namely, many problems in the modern world stem from a lack of empathy, which is partly a consequence of alienation between people of diverse cultural backgrounds.

Being open and accepting of cultural diversity not only broadens your horizons knowledge-wise, but also develops your empathy. Simply put, if you’re welcoming of cultural diversity, you will likely become more understanding of different people’s customs and experiences. As a result, you’ll be able to empathize with them even though your own experiences are different.

In the big-picture sense, multiculturalism can bridge the gap between people from different communities, breaking stereotypes and language barriers.

Personality and culture are closely related concepts, as a person’s cultural background contributes to their personality development.
Personality can change throughout life due to the variability of the factors shaping it.
People belonging to a particular cultural group will likely exhibit personality traits that align with the values and behaviors it prioritizes.
Exposure to different cultures influences personality changes, whether an individual welcomes cultural diversity or resists it.
Cultural awareness positively impacts personal and professional growth, as well as self-awareness, which is closely linked to personality and culture.

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