Englishmen are said to be reserved and circumspect, and Americans are said to be open and direct. Do these and similar stereotypes reflect psychological differences between human populations that can be measured and verified? If such differences between populations are real, how do they develop in individuals? How are these differences related to the social and cultural institutions in which people participate? Culture, Behavior, and Personality is addressed to these questions, which are central not only to the conventional anthropological subject of culture-and-personality study but more generally to the social and psychological study of the relationships between individuals, populations and their environments. The book combines a spirited and systematic defense of the basic assumptions of previous culture-and-personality work with a sharp and sometimes devastating critique of research in the field, in what can fairly be described as the first systematic introduction to theory and method in this area of study, intended to reconstruct it and put it on a sound basis for future teaching and research.
The book rests on two major new statements of viewpoint: first, a synthesis of culture-and-personality theory based on an explicit application of modern Darwinian concepts of variation and selection, and second, a naturalistic approach to comparative personality assessment based on the clinical methods of psychoanalysis. After a statement of the central problems of the field and a critique of previous formulations and research methods, the author presents the outlines of a "population psychology" analogous to population biology in comparing the distributions of individual characteristics across populations varying in their environments. This presentation includes detailed discussions of psychosocial adaptation in childhood and adulthood and under conditions of stability and change.