ABSTRACT
The influence of psychoanalytic concepts of personality on anthropology has been widely recognized and documented. Thus the premises that behavior is learned as well as adaptive or functional and that observation is an important method of studying behavior, are shared by behaviorism and much of modern anthropological thought. To understand properly how anthropologists have used behavior theory in studying personality, one must bear in mind the historical circumstances under which this first happened. The cross-cultural study by J. W. M. Whiting and Child remains the single most important anthropological investigation of personality in behavioristic terms, and the concept of personality contained therein is consequently worthy of attention. The initial phase of demonstrating by example how Hullian concepts could be applied to cultural data was followed by an hypothesis-testing phase, which became increasingly focused on the psychocultural effects of cross-cultural variations in child training practices.
