REFERENCE GROUPS Throughout one’s life certain groups are important as models for one sides and conduct norms. Such groups are called reference groups. At first, the family group is the most important, since it is the only group most infants have when they are most impressionable. All authorities agree that the basic personality characteristics of the individual are formed in these first years within…
SOCIAL ISOLATES. Seven hundred years ago, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, conducted an experiment to determine what language children would grow up to speak if they had never heard a single spoken word. Would they speak Hebrew-then thought to be the bl dest tongues-or Greek or Latin, or he language of their parents? He instructed foster mothers and nurses to feed and bathe…
Group Experience and Personality At the start of life there is no self. There is a physical organism but no sense of person. Soon the infant feels out the limits of its body, learning where its body ends and other things begin. The child begins to recognize people and tell them apart. At first, any man .c; a ‘daddy” and any…
SOCIALIZATION AND THE SELF The infant enters this world as a selfish little organism preoccupied with its physical needs. It soon becomes a human being, with a set of attitudes and values, likes and dislikes, goals and purposes, patterns of response,and a deep , abiding concept of the sort of person it is. Every person gets these through a process…
NORMS OF THE CULTURE. From the moment of birth, the child is treated in ways which shape the personality. Each culture provides a set of general influences, which vary endlessly from society to society. As Lirton writes, In some [societies) infants are given the breast whenever they cry for it. In others they are fed on it regular schedule. In some…
THE COOPERATIVE ZUNI. The Zuni of New Mexico are a placid people in an emotionally undisturbed world. The child is warmly welcomed, treated with tender fondness, and receives a great deal of loving attention. Responsibility for child care is diffuse; a child will be helped or corrected by any adult present. Faced with a united front of adults, children rarely misbehave, and may be…
THE ANXIOUS DOBUAN The Dobuan child in Melanesia might think twice about coming . into this world if it had any choice in the matter. It enters a family where the only member who is likely to care much about it is its uncle, its mother’s brother, to it is heir. Its father, who is interested in his own sister’s children, usually…
Culture and Personality Some experience is common to all cultures. Every where infant’s are nursed or fed by older persons live in groups, learn to communicate through language, experience punishments . and rewards of some kind, and have some other experiences common to the entire human species. It is also true that each society gives to ‘Virtually all its members certain experiences which…
Physical Environment and Personality Some of our earliest manuscripts are attempts to explain human behavior in terms of climate and geography. Sorriness [1928, chap. 3] summarizes the theories of hundreds of writers, from Confucius, Aristotle, and Hippocrates down to the modern geographer Ells worth Huntington, who have claimed that group differences in behavior, are due mainly to differences in climate, topography, and resources. Such…
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DEFINITIONS OF PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS. Millions of people believe that fat people are jolly, that people with high foreheads are intelligent, that red heads are hot-tempered, and that people with large jaws are forceful. Many such folk beliefs have been proved untrue when tested empirically but occasionally a valid association is found. For example, one researcher [Bar, 1977] compared a sample of…
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