Explain relationship between culture, society and personality.
1. Culture and society are inseparable.Society refers to a set of norms and values, guiding their behaviour to each other. Both culture and society are coterminous to each other. They are the two aspects of the same social situations.
2. Everyone in human society has personality. If we say that one has personality, we are not referring to physical features of the person as is sometimes, understood by common man.
3. Personality refers to that totality of a person, which consists of biological constitution, attitude, values, views, habits and behaviour pattern. The personality thus, is a sum total to acquired and innate dispositions of a person.
4. Social pshychology replete with those scholars who are confident that personality traits are entirely social and cultural.
5. Personality is shaped by social environment. F.H. Allport, H.A,. Murray, A. Kardiner and R. Linton are among those who have this view. Otto Klineberg falling in this line says that personality emerges mainly in a social situation but biological factors undoubtedly play a part in shapping the individual.
6. The controversy over the primacy of biological or social factors is resolved by G. Murphy who writes that personality is neither biological nor social but bio-social.
7. Apart from biological and social needs, people in society have many other needs. Such needs are socially and culturally generated, and their satisfaction is also controlled by the culutre of society.
8. How will the people adapt to the existing socio-cultural framework of needs and means depends on their capacity to learn. The capacity to learn differs from person to person because it is related to the organic constitution and also to the mental make-up of the individual and is both acquired and hereditary.
Conlusion : (a) In short, every individual in human society has a personality. Personaliyty is a product of the culture in whcih the person has been brought up. We know that the style of life i.e. the culture of a tribal community inhabited in some remote area is entirely different from that of an urban community. But if a tribal baby is raised in an urban family along with other babies, of the family, the personality of the baby so formed would be, altogether different from those of other member of the tribal community.
(b) If a Hindu child right from its babyhood is brought up by an orthdox Christian family, its behaviour and ideas in adulthood will hardly show any symptom of a Hindu. Same will also be the case of Christian baby who is broght up in a staunch Hindu family.
(c) The personality is so much determined by culture that a person brought up in a particular cultural environment will more or less misfit into the other.
