Cultural Constitution of Personality

Why examine personality in light of culture? A cultural approach is like a device that will allow us to image the various social worlds-sets of culture specific meanings and practices-that continually afford and maintain individual behavior.
A cultural approach can illuminate what has also been hidden, at least within an individualist culture; it makes visible the systems of meanings and practices- the language, the collective representations, the metaphors, the social scripts, the social structures, the policies; the institutions, the artifacts-within which people come to think and feel and act. For example, cross-cultural comparisons have show that Western theories of attribution processes do not apply well to non-Western populations, but distinctions between the sexes appear to be cultural universals.
During the history of cross-cultural comparisons, the direction of “transport and test” process was one way: research based on Western theories was tested in non-Western cultures. Unfortunately, this approach yielded a distorted picture of human nature, particularly of the non-Western society. This research yielded inconsistent results and failed to shed much light on the psychological realities of the non-Western society. The articulation of a truly universally understanding of human nature and personality therefore also requires the development of theories of behavior originating in all non-Western societies.
Cross-cultural research has shown that for many individuals, others are included in the self and the self system is much more interdependent, contextualized, or situation-specific than had previously been considered. These conceptions of an interdependent self-construal are now being used to more fully understand variation in the self system of members of Western societies, especially women.
The cultural