Outline of a Conception of Personality

Some of the criteria of ego structure, or ego strength, are the following:
A. Perception and apperception.
1. External objectivity: the ability to perceive human actions and events without
distortion, to analyze and interpret them realistically, to predict the behavior of
others.
2. Internal objectivity: the capacity for self-detachment and self-analysis; insight
into one's own motives, evaluations, and emotional reactions; also, the
entertainment of a goal of personal development and accomplishment which is
suited
to
one's
own
circumstances
and
capacities.
3. Long apperceptive span: the habit of making causal connections between
events that are not temporally contiguous in experience; the ability to foresee
broad or distant consequences of one's actions (time-binding power or long
time-perspective).
B. Intellection.
4. Concentration, directionality: the ability to apply one's mind to an assigned or
selected topic, to direct one's thoughts along a chosen path, to persist when
bored,
to
inhibit
day-dreaming.
5. Conjunctivity of thought and speech: the ability to think, speak, and write
clearly,
coherently,
and
logically,
to
inhibit
irrelevant
ideas.
6. Referentiality of thought and speech: the habit of using concepts and words
which refer to real things, events, and experiences; the absence of vague,
undefined, and essentially meaningless terms and expressions.
C. Conation.
7. Will-power: the ability to do what one resolves to do and is capable of doing,
to persist in the face of difficulties, to complete a prescribed or elected course of
action;
also,
to
re-strive
after
failure
(counteraction).
8. Conjunctivity of action: the ability to schedule and organize one's activities, to
make
a
plan
and
follow
it,
to
live
an
ordered
life.
9. Resolution of conflicts: the ability to choose between alternative courses of
action. The absence of protracted periods of hesitation, indecision, vacillation, or
perplexity.
10. Selection of impulses: the power to repress temporarily, inhibit, or modify
unacceptable emotions or tendencies, to resist "temptations"; also, the habit of
selecting and expressing, without qualms or conflict, impulses which are
intrinsically enjoyable or extrinsically rewarding; absence of disturbing worries or
anxieties.
11. Selection of social pressures and influences: the ability to choose among the
demands, claims, enticements, and suggestions that are made by other people,
to comply with those that are acceptable and reject those that are not;
especially the power to resist intolerable coercions from society, but to submit if
there
is
no
way
out;
power
"to
will
the
obligatory."
12. Initiative and self-sufficiency: the ability to decide for oneself and act without
waiting to be stimulated, urged, or encouraged. The habit of trusting one's own
nature, of having reasonable confidence in one's own decisions (self-reliance).
Also, the ability to stand alone, to do and finish things alone, without help; to
endure solitude and to tolerate misfortune without appealing for sympathy;
absence
of
marked
dependence
on
others.

13. Responsibility for collective action: the willingness and ability to take
responsibility and effectively organize and direct the behaviors of others; the
experience of feeling secure in a position of authority, rather than being
threatened,
worried,
and
on
the
defensive.
14. Adherence to resolutions and agreements: the disposition and ability to
abide by long-term decisions and commitments, to keep a promise or pledge.
15. Absence of pathological symptoms: freedom from incapacitating neurotic or
psychotic symptoms.

Personality Formation: the Determinants

EVERY MAN is in certain respects
a. like all other men,
b. like some other men,
c. like no other man.
He is like all other men because some of the determinants of his personality are
universal to the species. That is to say, there are common features in the
biological endowments of all men, in the physical environment they inhabit, and
in the societies and cultures in which they develop. It is the very obviousness of
this fact which makes restatements of it expedient, since, like other people, we
students of personality are naturally disposed to be attracted by what is
unusual, by the qualities which distinguish individuals, environments, and
societies, and so to overlook the common heritage and lot of man. It is possible
that the most important of the undiscovered determinants of personality and
culture are only to be revealed by close attention to the commonplace. Every
man experiences birth and must learn to move about and explore his
environment, to protect himself against extremes of temperature and to avoid
serious injuries; every man experiences sexual tensions and other importunate
needs and must learn to find ways of appeasing them; every man grows in
stature, matures, and dies; and he does all this and much more, from first to
last, as a member of a society. These characteristics he shares with the majority
of herd animals, but others are unique to him. Only with those of his own kind
does he enjoy an erect posture, hands that grasp, three-dimensional and color
vision, and a nervous system that permits elaborate speech and learning
processes of the highest order.
It is suggested that clear and orderly thinking about personality formation will be
facilitated if four classes of determinants (and their interactions) are
distinguished: constitutional, group-membership, role, and situational. These will
help us to understand in what ways every man is "like all other men," "like some
other
men,"
"like
no
other
man."
1. CONSTITUTIONAL DETERMINANTS
The old problem of "heredity or environment" is essentially meaningless. The
two sets of determinants can rarely be completely disentangled once the
environment has begun to operate. All geneticists are agreed today that traits
are not inherited in any simple sense. The observed characters of organisms are,
at any given point in time, the product of a long series of complex interactions
between biologically-inherited potentialities and environmental forces. The
outcome of each interaction is a modification of the personality. The only

pertinent
questions
therefore
are:
(1) which of the various genetic potentialities will be actualized as a
consequence of a particular series of life-events in a given physical, social, and
cultural
environment?
and
(2) what limits to the development of this personality are set by genetic
constitution?
Because there are only a few extreme cases in which an individual is definitely
committed by his germ plasm to particular personality traits we use the term
"constitutional" rather than "hereditary." "Constitution" refers to the total
physiological make-up of an individual at a given time. This is a product of
influences emanating from the germ plasm and influences derived from the
environment (diet, drugs, etc.).
Since most human beings (including scientists) crave simple solutions and tend
to feel that because simple questions can be asked there must be simple
answers, there are numberless examples both of overestimation and of
underestimation of constitutional factors in theories of personality formation.
Under the spell of the spectacular success of Darwinian biology and the
medicine of the last hundred years, it has often been assumed that personality
was no less definitely "given" at birth than was physique. At most, it was
granted that a personality "unfolded" as the result of a strictly biological process
of maturation. On the other hand, certain psychiatrists, sociologists, and
anthropologists have recently tended to neglect constitutional factors almost
completely. Their assumptions are understandable in terms of common human
motivations. Excited by discovering the effectiveness of certain determinants,
people are inclined to make these explain everything instead of something.
Moreover, it is much more cheerful and reassuring to believe that environmental
factors (which can be manipulated) are all important, and that hereditary factors
(which can't be changed) are comparatively inconsequential. Finally, the
psychiatrists, one suspects, are consciously or unconsciously defending their
livelihood when they minimize the constitutional side of personality.
There are substantial reasons for believing that different genetic structures carry
with them varying potentialities for learning, for reaction time, for energy level,
for frustration tolerance. Different people appear to have different biological
rhythms: of growth, of menstrual cycle, of activity, of depression and exaltation.
The various biologically inherited malfunctions certainly have implications for
personality development, though there are wide variations among those who
share the same physical handicap (deafness, for example).
Sex and age must be regarded as among the more striking constitutional
determinants of personality. Personality is also shaped through such traits of
physique as stature, pigmentation, strength, conformity of features to the
culturally fashionable type, etc. Such characteristics influence a man's needs
and expectations. The kind of world he finds about him is to a considerable
extent determined by the way other people react to his appearance and physical
capacities.
2. GROUP MEMBERSHIP DETERMINANTS
The members of any organized ~ enduring group tend to manifest certain
personality traits more frequently than do members of other groups. How large
or how small are the groupings one compares depends on the problem at hand.
By and large, the motivational structures and action patterns of Western

Europeans seem similar when contrasted to those of Mohammedans of the Near

East or to Eastern Asiatics. Most white citizens of the United States, in spite of
regional, ethnic, and class differences, have features of personality which
distinguish them from Englishmen, Australians, or New Zealanders. In
distinguishing group-membership determinants, one must usually take account
of a concentric order of social groups to which the individual belongs, ranging
from large national or international groups down to small local units. One must
also know the hierarchical class, political or social, to which he belongs within
each of these groups. How inclusive a unit one considers in speaking of groupmembership determinants is purely a function of the level of abstraction at
which one is operating at a given time. Some of the personality traits which tend
to distinguish the members of a given group from humanity as a whole derive
from a distinctive biological heritage. Persons who live together are more likely
to have the same genes than are persons who live far apart. If the physical
vitality is typically low for one group as contrasted with other groups, or if
certain types of endocrine imbalance are unusually frequent, the personalities
the members of that group will probably have distinctive qualities. In the greater
number of cases, however, the similarities of character within a group are
traceable less to constitutional factors than to formative influences of the
environment to which all members of the group have been subjected. Of these
group-membership determinants, culture is with little doubt the most significant.
To say that "culture determines" is of course, a highly abstract way of speaking.
What one actually observes is the interaction of people. One never sees
"culture" any more than one sees "gravity." But "culture" is a very convenient
construct which helps in understanding certain regularities in human events, just
as "gravity" represents one type of regularity in physical events. Those who
have be trained in childhood along traditional lines, and even those who have as
adults adopted some new design for living, will be apt to behave predictably in
many contexts because of a prevailing tendency to conform to group standards.
Of course we are speaking here of general tendencies rather than invariable
facts. If there were no variations in the conception and applications of cultural
standards, personalities formed in a given society would be more nearly alike
than they actually are. Culture determines only what an individual learns as a
member of a group - not so much what he learns as a private individual and as a
member of a particular family. Because of these special experiences and
particular constitutional endowments, each person's selection from and reaction
to cultural teachings have an individual quality. What is learned is almost never
symmetrical and coherent, and only occasionally it is fully integrated. Deviation
from cultural norms is inevitable and endless, for variability appears to be a
property of all biological organisms.
3. ROLE DETERMINANTS
The culture defines how the different functions, or roles, necessary to group life
are to be performed - such roles, for example, as those assigned on the basis of
sex and age, or on the basis of membership in a caste, class, or occupational
group. In a sense, the role determinants of personality are a special class of
group-membership determinants; they apply to strata that cross-cut most kinds
of group membership. The long-continued playing of a distinctive role, however,
appears to be so potent in differentiating personalities within a group that it is
useful
to
treat
these
determinants
separately.
Moreover, if one is aware of the role determinants, one will less often be misled

in interpreting various manifestations of personality. In this connection it is worth

recalling that, in early Latin, persona means "a mask " - dramatis personae are
the masks which actors wear in a play, that is, the characters that are
represented. Etymologically and historically, then, the personality is the
character that is manifested in public. In modern psychology and sociology this
corresponds rather closely to the role behavior of a differentiated person. From
one point of view, this constitutes a disguise. Just as the outer body shields the
viscera from view, and clothing the genitals, so the public personality shields the
private personality from the curious and censorious world. It also operates to
conceal underlying motivations from the individual's own consciousness. The
person who has painfully achieved some sort of integration, and who knows
what is expected of him in a particular social situation, will usually produce the
appropriate responses with only a little personal coloring. This explains, in part,
why the attitudes and action patterns produced by the group-membership and
role determinants constitute a screen which, in the case of normal individuals,
can be penetrated only by the intensive, lengthy, and oblique procedures of
depth psychology. The disposition to accept a person's behavior in a given
situation as representative of his total personality is almost universal. Very often
he is merely conforming, very acceptably, to the cultural definition of his role.
4. SITUATIONAL DETERMINANTS
Besides the constitutional determinants and the forces which will more or less
inevitably confront individuals who live in the same physical environment, who
are members of a society of a certain size and of a certain culture, and who play
the same roles, there are things which "just happen" to people. Even casual
contacts of brief duration ("accidental" i.e., not foreordained by the cultural
patterns for social interrelations) are often crucial, it seems, in determining
whether a person's life will proceed along one or another of various possible
paths. A student, say, who is undecided as to his career, or who is about equally
drawn to several different vocations, happens to sit down in a railroad car next
to a journalist who is an engaging and persuasive advocate of his profession.
This event does not, of course, immediately and directly change the young
man's personality, but it may set in motion a chain of events which put him into
situations that are decisive in molding his personality.
The situational determinants include things that happen a thousand times as
well as those that happen only once -provided they are not standard for a whole
group. For example, it is generally agreed that the family constellation in which
a person grows up is a primary source of personality styling. These domestic
influences are conditioned by the cultural prescriptions for the roles of parents
and children. But a divorce, a father who is much older than the mother, a father
whose occupation keeps him away from home much of the time, the fact of
being an only child or the eldest or youngest in a series - these are situational
determinants. Contact with a group involves determinants which are classified
as group-membership or situational, depending on the individual's sense of
belongingness or commitment to the group. The congeries of persons among
whom a man accidentally finds himself one or more times may affect his
personality development but not in the same manner as those social units with
which the individual feels himself allied as a result of shared experiences or of
imaginative identification.
5. INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE DETERMINANTS

"Culture and personality" is one of the fashionable slogans of contemporary

social science and, by present usage, denotes a range of problems on the
borderline between anthropology and sociology, on the one hand, and
psychology and psychiatry, on the other. However, the phrase has unfortunate
implications.
A dualism is implied, whereas "culture in personality" and "personality in
culture" would suggest conceptual models more in accord with the facts.
Moreover, the slogan favors a dangerous simplification of the problems of
personality formation. Recognition of culture as one of the determinants of
personality is a great gain, but there are some indications that this theoretical
advance has tended to obscure the significance of other types of determinants.
"Culture and personality" is as lopsided as "biology and personality." To avoid
perpetuation of an over-emphasis upon culture, the writers have treated cultural
forces as but one variety of the press to which personalities are subjected as a
consequence of their membership in an organized group. A balanced
consideration of "personality in nature, society, and culture" must be carried on
within the framework of a complex conceptual scheme which explicitly
recognizes, instead of tacitly, excluding, a number of types of determinants. But
it must also not be forgotten that any classification of personality determinants
is, at best, a convenient abstraction. A few illustrations of the intricate linkage of
the determinants will clarify this point. For example, we may instance a network
of cultural, role, and constitutional determinants. In every society the child is
differently socialized according to sex. Also, in every society different behavior is
expected of individuals in different age groups, although each culture makes its
own prescriptions as to where these lines are drawn and what behavioral
variations are to be anticipated. Thus, the personalities of men and women, of
the old and the young, are differentiated, in part, by the experience of playing
these various roles in conformity with cultural standards. But, since age and sex
are biological facts, they also operate throughout life as constitutional
determinants of personality. A woman's motivations and action patterns are
modified by the facts of her physique as a woman. Some factors that one is
likely to pigeonhole all too complacently as biological often turn out, on careful
examination, to be the product of complicated interactions. Illness may result
from group as well as from individual constitutional factors. And illness, in turn,
may be considered a situational determinant. The illness - with all of its effects
upon personality formation - is an "accident" in that one could predict only that
the betting odds were relatively high that this individual would fall victim to this
illness. However, when the person does become a patient, one can see that both
a constitutional predisposition and membership in a caste or class group where
sanitation and medical care were substandard are causative factors in this
"accidental" event. Similarly, a constitutional tendency towards corpulence
certainly has implications for personality when it is characteristic of a group as
well as when it distinguishes an individual within a group. But the resources of
the physical environment as exploited by the culturally-transmitted technology
are major determinants in the production and utilization of nutritional
substances of various sorts and these have patent consequences for corpulence,
stature, and energy potential.
6. SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN PERSONALITY
In conclusion, let us return for a moment to the observed fact that every man is
"like all other men, like some other men, like no other man." In the beginning
there is (1) the organism and (2) the environment. Using this division as the
starting point in thinking about personality formation, one might say that the

differences observed in the personalities of human beings are due to variations

in their biological equipment and in the total environment to which they must
adjust, while the similarities are ascribable to biological and environmental
regularities. Although the organism and the environment have a kind of
wholeness in the concrete behavioral world which the student loses sight of at
his peril, this generalization is substantially correct. However, the formulation
can be put more neatly in terms of field. There is (1) the organism moving
through a field which is (2) structured both by culture and by the physical and
social world in a relatively uniform manner, but which is (3) subject to endless
variation within the general patterning due to the organism's constitutionallydetermined peculiarities of reaction and to the occurrence of special situations.
In certain circumstances, one reacts to men and women, not as unique
organizations of experience, but as representatives of a group. In other
circumstances, one reacts to men and women primarily as fulfilling certain roles.
If one is unfamiliar with the Chinese, one is likely to react to them first as
Chinese rather than as individuals.
To summarize: The personality of an individual is the product of inherited
dispositions and environmental experiences. These experiences occur within the
field of his physical, biological, and social environment, all of which are modified
by the culture of his group. Similarities of life experience and heredity will tend
to produce similar personality characteristics in different individuals, whether in
the same society or in different societies.