Culture and Personality.

During the 1940s anthropologists, who study human beings in relation to their physical and social environments, focused on the ways in which culture influences personality. In her Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a classic example of a culture and personality study, anthropologist Margaret Mead found none of the internal psychological conflict and rebellion characteristic of adolescents in the West among Samoan girls, demonstrating the relativity of Western concepts of psychological development and arguing that psychology cannot be understood without taking culture into account. Mead had become well known by the 1940s, and this influential study was republished for the armed forces in 1945. During World War II Mead engaged in war work for the National Research Council and the Office of War Information (OWI) and wrote And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), in which she explored the large, complex culture of the United States...