Personality and Social Structure
Three questions underlie the study of social structure and personality: What is social structure? What is personality? And, what is the relationship between the two? The history of this area and the current state of knowledge contain tremendous variability in the answers to these questions.
For example, social structure includes whole cultural configurations, social institutions such as family and the state, social stratification and class, the nature of roles, organizational structures, group dynamics, and micro-features of day-to-day interactions. Social structure also includes process and change at the group level, such as economic depression-recession, modernization, revolution, war, organizational growth and decline, human development and aging, and life-course transitions (school-to-work, retirement).
Concepts and approaches to personality also have a rich history in this area, with many variations. These include attitudes, abilities, affective and attributional styles, values, beliefs, cognitive schema, identities, aspirations, views of the self and others, and individual behaviors. The concept of personality, too, connotes both structure and process or change. Most contemporary observers would agree with a definition of personality as "regularities and consistencies in the behavior of individuals in their lives" (Snyder and Ickes 1985, p. 883). In some approaches, attitude and the self precede and determine behavior; in other approaches, people observe behavior and infer their own mental states and features of self.
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