1. Common Experiences:
All families in a given culture share certain common beliefs, customs, and values. While growing up, the child learns to behave in ways expected by the culture. One of these expectations has to do with sex roles. Most cultures expect different behaviors from males than from females.
Sex roles may vary from culture to culture, but is considered “natural” in any culture for boys and girls to have predictable differences in personality merely because they belong to one or the other sex.
A culture as complex as that of the United States contains numerous subcultures, each with its own views about such things as moral values, standards of cleanliness, style of dress, and definitions of success. The cultural subgroup exerts its influence on the developing personality.
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All boys are expected to show certain personality characteristics (as compared with girls), but a poor boy raised in an urban slum is expected to behave differently in some respects than a well-to-do boy raised in a middle-class suburb.
Some roles such as occupations are of our own choosing. But such roles are also patterned by the culture. Different behaviors are expected of doctors, truck drivers, rock group artists, and opera singers.
To be sure, occupational stereotypes have becomes less rigid in recent years; we are no longer shocked by business executives with hair below the ears, female telephone linemen, or the rock singer with a crew cut. But, to some extent, people comfortable in an occupation, if they behave as others do in that occupation.
To the extent that adult behavior conforms to social and occupational roles, it is predictable. We know pretty much what to expect of people at a formal reception, a political demonstration, a football game, or a funeral.
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Although, cultural and sub cultural pressures impose some personality similarities, individual personality is never completely predictable from a knowledge of the group in which a person is raised, for two reasons. (1) The cultural impacts upon the person are not uniform because, they are transmitted by way of certain people-parents and others-who are not all alike in their values and practices; (2) the individual has some experiences that are unique.
2. Unique Experiences:
Each person reacts in his own way to social pressures. Personal differences in behavior may result from biological differences-differences in physical strength, sensitivity, and endurance.
They may result from the rewards and punishments imposed by the parents and the type of behavior modeled by them. Even though he may not resemble them, a child shows the influences of his parents. The contrasting possibilities of these influences are described by two brothers in Sinclair Lewis’ novel Work of art. Each of them ascribes his personality to his home surroundings.
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Although, their extreme reactions to the same early environment are less likely to occur in real life, individuals to respond differently to similar circumstances
Beyond a unique biological inheritance and the specific ways in which the culture is transmitted, the individual is shaped by particular experiences. An illness with a long convalescence may provide satisfactions in being cared for and waited upon that profoundly affect the personality structure.
Death of a parent may disrupt the usual identifications. Accidents, opportunities for heroism, winning a contest, moving to another part of the country-countless such experiences are relevant to development but, are not predictable from the culture, although, their effects are partly determined by the culture.