ABSTRACT
The concept of culture not only seemed to provide the definitive refutation of the notion of a universal human nature, but appeared to be a refined tool for understanding group differences in behavior. Since human nature is culturally determined, and since cultures vary enormously, the only valid generalization that can be made about human nature is that it is enormously malleable. From a theory of the generic cultural determination of single pancultural human nature, it has become a theory of the historically specific cultural determination of many culturally relative human natures. For if certain cultural characteristics are pancultural, then, ex hypothesi, certain personality characteristics are also pancultural, and they, at least, compose man’s pancultural human nature. Although the thesis that culture is the exclusive determinant of personality accounts in part for the traditional denial of a pancultural human nature, the thesis that personality is the internalization of culture has been even more decisive in this regard.
