Self-Talks 3: Personality and Culture

Have you ever watched a Filipino drama where someone who seemed to have a bad personality changed because of falling in love, losing someone, or right after he started to believe to God?

Have you ever heard a person saying, “Hindi na ‘yan magbabago pa, wala na tayong magagawa. (He will never change, we cannot do anything with it.)”?

How about reading a comment being told to some students, “Sayang ang pagpapaaral ng gobyerno sa inyo (It is such as waste to the government on letting you enter school!)!”?

As we go through personality and culture, we will be encountering ideas that could help us why did we encounter such events and statements.

Personality

Defining personality is not an easy task, it is maybe because it exists in all of us and that we have our own ways of defining it or maybe, we were set to view things in a certain manner, which could be uniform or not to the social groups we belong, just like the other words, “personality” covers a lot of words and so ideas, theories, and concepts behind it. In this article, we will set a definition crafted by the APA for us to start the flow of this article.
Personality is a stable set of behavioral and experiential characteristics of an individual (American Psychological Association [APA], 2014).

The definition given may not be exactly similar to yours but there should be keywords that matched yours. Moreover, defining personality opens us to many other things and thoughts, right? Nevertheless, explaining personality could help us further understand how personality works and is expressed by our behaviors.

Three Principles Explaining Personality

• Consistency – we are expected to behave the same way as we mostly behave before in a past situation.
• Causation – our behaviors, feelings, and thoughts are triggered within us by our personality features.
• Organization – as we display a lot of characteristics, it may be deemed as unrelated with each other, but they may be organized, some may be our main features and some are the secondary features central to the main features.

Personality’s Dichotomies

Personality is also described as a coexistence of at least two opposite conditions but at the same time, such opposite conditions are dependent with each other. Well, we cannot categorize something as “big” if “small” is non-existent. Describing personality also uses such concept.

• Personality is Unique and Typical – we are unique in particular ways but such particular uniqueness could exist with other people, thus, our apparent uniqueness could be typical.
• Personality Features Can Be Central and Peripheral – a personality feature could be central as it tends to be displayed in wide range and in various degree. A personality feature could be peripheral as such feature is displayed in specific circumstances only. However, we cannot conclude that central features are more important than peripheral, added the fact that their differences are not that well-defined.
• Personality is Stable and Evolving – the stability of our personality is not forever constant, we will be involved in different situations that could put a change in our personality.
• Personality Can Be Viewed as “Normal” and “Abnormal” – people are the ultimate judges, we set standards on what is acceptable and not, as we display our personality, we are tagged either “normal” or “abnormal”.
• Personality is Rooted in Nature and Nurture – what made us a person? Is it the nature including biological factors or the nurture including the social factors? Personality development is impacted by both biological and social factors.
• Personality Refers to Body and Mind – our body and mind are connected, what the mind thinks is displayed by our body, thus, are personality features is inseparable from our bodies and so from our minds.
• Personality is Active and Reactive – we act and react based on our personality. We may act differently in a certain situation, seeing how others act causes us to react, releasing more of our personality.

Culture

Just like personality, culture is a difficult term to define. According to Tyler (1870), culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of a society. Spencer-Oatey (2008) also added that culture is a set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioral conventions shared in a society which will then influence behavior and interpretations of other people’s behavior. Culture exists in all the society, there may be similarities but there will be differences at the same time.

Key Characteristics of Culture

• Culture is manifested at different layers of depth. Culture is manifested everywhere in every layers of depth, from the observable artifacts, values, and basic underlying assumptions.
• Culture affects behavior and interpretations of behavior. Culture sets a standard for us like through moral beliefs and norms on how should we act and how should we react on other’s acts.
• Culture can be differentiated from both universal human nature and unique individual personality. Culture is different from the human nature which is universal to all of us and from our individual personalities which is unique. Culture is specific to a group or category.
• Culture influences biological processes. Biological processes such as simply eating is influenced by culture, some from other places love eating vegetables, some may be into meat, and some may be into both.
• Culture is associated with social groups. Culture cannot exist with only a person participating, there must be a group of people that will be sharing the same thinking and characteristics to form a culture.
• Culture is both an individual construct and a social construct. Culture exists and constructed starting from every individual up to a global context.
• Culture is always both socially and psychologically distributed in a group, and so the delineation of a culture’s features will always be fuzzy. Attitudes, beliefs, and etc. are not identical from every individua, rather, they simply resemble each other as it is distributed in the group, thus, culture is a “fuzzy” concept.
• Culture has both universal (etic) and distinctive (emic) elements. A culture has universal cultural elements and culture-specific, unique elements. Emic elements may adapt from the etic elements, and emic elements may start to exist when emic elements start to spread.
• Culture is learned. Culture is not inherited but learned. As we participate in different social interactions, we learn culture.
• Culture is subject to gradual change. Slowly, as new things are introduced, culture starts to adapt on such change and thus slowly change itself.
• The various parts of a culture are all, to some degree, interrelated. Culture is a systematic concept; a culture lives as they are continuously learned while its parts strengthens each other.
• Culture is descriptive not an evaluative concept. We cannot use culture to evaluate someone, as it is not a mean of measuring the intrinsic values of an individual, we can use and interpret culture to describe people and nothing beyond it.

Personality and Culture

Today, we relate personality to culture and culture to personality. Going back to the very first part of this article, analyzing such examples could be related to personality and culture. Our personality has significant relation with culture.

Watching a Filipino drama where someone who seemed to have a bad personality changed because of falling in love, losing someone, or right after he started to believe to God entails that even a personality which has been stable for a long time could change or evolve suddenly.

Hearing a person saying, “Hindi na ‘yan magbabago pa, wala na tayong magagawa. (He will never change, we cannot do anything with it.)” tells us that culture taught us on how to interpret a personality.

Reading a comment being told to some students, “Sayang ang pagpapaaral ng gobyerno sa inyo (It is such as waste to the government on letting you enter school!)!” implies that we are still diversified and divided even though we are already share similar culture as such culture becomes more specific in a smaller context.

Personality and culture are enriched as we continue to interact within our society and at the same time, they also trigger such interactions. Individuals with different personalities forms a group which needs culture to contain social disruptions. Moreover, as the two of them covers broad concepts and ideas, their interrelatedness could differ just like how they differ around the world, but one thing is for sure, everyone of us have it both as they are non-existent without humans as thinkers and initiator or worldwide change.

References
- SAGE Publications, Inc. (2017) Chapter 1: Introducing Personality
- Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012) What is Culture? A compilation of quotations. GlobalPAD Core Concepts.