Today, cultural constructs rarely play a role in mainstream personality psychology. McCrae (2000) writes that old theories such as psychological anthropology that model the fundamental relationship between an individual and the larger society have not kept pace with the development of mainstream personality psychology. The author also explains the importance of understanding how culture is related to human nature and common sense and both will continue to be adaptive. McCrae (2002) also identifies three levels that might be labeled as transcultural, intercultural and intracultural understandings. He strongly believes that trait psychology should be the basis for new personality and culture studies.
One approach to understanding masculinity and femininity is through the trait psychology. Friedman and Schustack (2016) explain that while many psychologists agree these two terms are important traits, they have not in fact been properly identified and nobody has properly defined these characteristics. It is generally understood that masculinity and femininity are two opposite poles of a single trait but a lot of people, including psychologists, see the problems with this conceptualization. For example, this bipolar continuum does not account for individuals who exhibit the opposite traits.
Culture continues to influence the way males and females are shaped and this may start with parenting. As parents conform to the notions that girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks, the gender roles are predefined for the children and it is a form of indoctrination. However, parents have a great role in gender socialization.
One example of this is Nicola Heath (2018), she’s a mother of two daughters who writes, “I want my two daughters, aged three and five, to avoid the pitfalls of modern femininity, so I dress them in shorts, talk to them about science and encourage them to play with cars and dinosaurs as well as their dolls.” While Nicola is not enforcing a specific feminine role on her daughters, she is not teaching gender-neutrality either. Bender, Beller, and Klauer (2018) suggest that the gender roles are deeply embedded in all cultures when one observes how language has masculine and feminine words. They posit that word properties strongly interfere with the way we conceptualize the things we talk about which further emphasizes our attribution of traits and roles to genders.
References
Bender, A., Beller, S., & Klauer, K. C. (2018). Gender Congruency From a Neutral Point of View: The Roles of Gender Classes and Conceptual Connotations. Journal Of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, And Cognition, doi:10.1037/xlm0000534
Friedman, H. S. & Schustack, M. W. (2016). Personality: Classic theories and modern research (6th ed.). MA: Pearson.
Heath, N. (2018). Our gender obsession is not serving us well. Are we ready for gender creative parenting? | Nicola Heath. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/18/our-gender-obsession-is-not-serving-us-well-are-we-ready-for-gender-creative-parenting
McCrae, R. R. (2000). Trait Psychology and the Revival of Personality and Culture Studies. American Behavioral Scientist, (1), 10.
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