| Sumario: | In recent years, cultural anthropologists and social psychologists have made intensive studies of the relationships between personality and socialization. They have arrived at a methodological distinction which has proved helpful in the analysis of personality. In the light of their comparative data on the socialization of individual children in different societies, they have set up the operational principle that personality can best be studied in terms of two basic interacting systems of behavior. One system of actions, feelings and thoughts is cultural. It is learned by the individual from his basic social groups: his family, his age-groups, his sex group, his social-class group, and so on. The other system of responses is individual, or "idiosyncratic," or "private." The use of this hypothesis and its various derivative forms seems likely to bring some order into the chaotic field of personality studies. As a methodological distinction, it is useful both in the exploration of the life-history, and likewise in the cross-sectional study of personality-traits in a population.
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