ABSTRACT
Psychology and psychiatry, central disciplines in the quest for understanding individual behavioral dispositions, have never had an easy time with group differences. Without major exception, dimensions of variation that can be useful in theory and practice concerning individuals have become awkward, confusing, and invidious when they are used to characterize sets of individuals. Race differences in intelligence, sex differences in field-dependence, cultural differences in personality, these and other extensions of individual psychology to natural group differences repeat a pattern of error that, while possibly as necessary for growth as falling off the bicycle while learning to ride, can be seen now as wasteful and injurious. It gives one pause at the threshold of research on culture and temperament.
