Discuss the roles of race, gender, and culture in shaping personality

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANS: Despite their disagreements and divergences, however, all personality theorists share certain defining characteristics in common. All are White, of European or American heritage, and almost all are men. At the time, nearly all of the great advances in the arts, philosophy, literature, and the sciences, including the development of the scientific methods, were propounded and promoted by White men of European or American background. In most fields, educational and professional opportunities for women and people of ethnic minority groups were severely limited. In addition, in the field of personality theory, virtually all the patients and subjects the earlier theories were based on were also White. Even the laboratory rats were white. Also, the majority of the patients and subjects were men. Although the theorists accepted, to some degree, the importance of social and environmental forces in shaping personality, they tended to ignore or minimize the influence of gender and ethnic background.
Individual competitiveness and assertiveness are often seen as undesirable and contrary to Asian cultural standards. Western cultures are typically depicted as the opposite. For example, when college students in Australia were compared with college students in Japan, the Australians were found to emphasize the importance of individuality much more than the Japanese, who were more oriented toward the collective or the group. People in individualistic cultures show greater extraversion, self-esteem, happiness (or subjective well-being), optimism about their future, and a belief in their ability to control and direct it. For example, one massive study of over 400 million people in 63 countries found that the personality trait of individualism was strongly and consistently related to positive well-being. The impact on behavior and personality of cultural differences in child-rearing practices is also substantial. In the individualistic culture of the United States, parents tend to be noncoercive, democratic, and permissive in their child-rearing techniques. In collectivist cultures, such as Asian and Arab societies, parental practices tend to be more authoritarian, restrictive, and controlling. Nordic cultures such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark provide another example of cultures encouraging self-effacement. The cultural concept of Janteloven enjoins people not to place their own interests above those of their community and to show humility in the presence of others. A comparison of college students in the United States and Norway found that the Americans rated themselves significantly higher than average on positive personality traits and lower than average on negative traits than the Norwegian students did.