Title: National Character | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: National Character
National Character
National Character
History of the field
Culture and personality
Culture at a distance
Approaches to national-character analysis
The basic personality
The modal personality
Child rearing
Functional prerequisites
Sociopolitical interpretations
Controversies over research
Unresolved questions
BIBLIOGRAPHY
national character

Content: Almost every generally accepted, unquestioned “universal” concerning the psychological nature of man and the basic elements of social, economic, or political life has been seriously challenged by the anthropological data which present the full spectrum of world cultures. During the course of World War n, a number of anthropologists developed the idea that their concern with culturally determined personality differences had equal relevance to understanding differences among Western nations. They believed that careful evaluation of characteristics common to significant segments of the populations of the nations involved in world conflict could lead to more meaningful analysis of diverse sociopolitical developments occurring within these national states. Moreover, they contended that a systematic analysis of the differences in “national character” within the Western societies would lead to insights into the periodic tensions and misunderstandings that had arisen between individual members of both the then allied and enemy national groups. Culture and personality
Anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski had been stimulated by dynamic psychosocial theories of human nature, principally the theory of psychoanalysis, and were prompted to search out test cases challenging universal statements concerning man’s psychological functioning. By the time of World War n social anthropologists in the United States, as a group, had become increasingly concerned with crosscultural studies in the problems of personality development. The subdiscipline of culture and personality became a valid specialization within anthropological research. The methods developed in culture-and-personality studies were considered applicable to analyses that would produce a deeper understanding of the behavior of nationals from various European countries and from Japan. In addition to employing the careful observations used in ethnographic work, culture-and-personality research also borrowed techniques and methods developed in clinical psychology and psychiatry for individual psychodiagnosis. Culture-and-personality research employed direct observation of child socialization in the family, depth interviews, detailed life history data, dream analysis, and projective psychological techniques such as the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test.