Are there any risks in ascribing certain behaviours to large groups of people?
It is difficult to explain to people that I am talking about societies and not individuals. I run into this problem a lot in North America, if I might say so, which tends to be very individualistic. Society is to an individual like a forest is to a tree and you cannot describe a forest as just a bunch of trees. The mistake was made by Margaret Mead. She talked about culture as personality writ large. It is not so. It is a society with all kinds of personalities interacting. It is true that personality tests partly reflect the culture of origin. The formative time is actually before puberty, and the environment you grow up in influences certain aspects of your personality. Only part of it, but if you have enough people who have grown up in that same environment, then their personalities will have common elements. Lots of people ask me, particularly Americans, if they can have culture tests for their students so they can see their culture. This is absolute nonsense because a student can
