The Connection Of Culture & Personality

Culture & Personality

“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.”Culture is simply ‘the way of life’. It is the social behavior and norms found in the human societies. It has a wide domain of expressive forms like Art & Crafts, Music & Dance, Rituals & Traditions, Technologies, Religion, Devotion & Celebration, Food & Clothing and much more. Just like one needs a map to navigate over unknown spaces or territory, in the same way one needs culture to conduct and behave in the society. Society works upon various norms that are acceptable to its inhabitants. A society is formed when a large number of people come together and dwell in an area.

Speaking of a large group of people, one must keep in mind that all the individuals in a given society do not hail from same backgrounds rather they come from various religions, races, castes, creeds, colour, sex, ethnicity, economic background, linguistic groups. People of different social strata have different ways of conduct depending on the culture in which they are raised. So there arises situations of clashes and conflicts among communities in a society when one’s religious traditions or rituals is unacceptable to the others. It is often said that there is a significant impact of culture on education, decision making, governance, and on personality of an individual. Talking about personality, it is a wide concept which is subdivided into various sub groups. Personality is the characteristic set of behaviours, cognitions, and emotional patterns that evolve from biological and environmental factors. Personality psychology tries to explain tendencies underlining behavioural differences.

An individual tends to behave in a society in the way he is trained by his family. A child inherits almost all traits of behaviour, code of conduct, visualing things, handling situations, interaction process, analyzing, interpretation, socializing by looking at the activities of his/her elders in the family, relatives or neighbourhood. So it can be summed up that our cultures impact a lot on our personality. Cultures are region specific and are dynamic in nature i.e.; they can change in the passage of time. They are flexible as well and keep on changing according to the needs of the society. Basically cultures are our day to day conduct processes, so whenever a society thinks of eradicating some conventional practices, they can and even new set of practices which are modern enough are acquired.