The Power of Peers
• Children, like adults, live in two environments:
their homes and their world outside the home.
• At home, children learn how their parents want
them to behave and what they can get away with.
• At school, however, they conform to their peers’:
– dress
– habits
– language
– rules
• Peers play a tremendous role in shaping our
personality traits and behavior.
• They can cause us to emphasize some attributes
or abilities and downplay others.
• Of course, our temperaments and dispositions
also cause us to select particular peer groups.
• Likewise, our temperaments influence how we
behave within the group.
• Many qualities that Western psychologists treat as
individual personality traits are heavily influenced
by culture.
• People from individualist cultures define
themselves in different terms than those from
collectivist cultures.
– In individualist cultures, the independence of the
individual often takes precedence over the group.
– In collectivist cultures, the self is defined in the context
of relationships and the community.
• Individualist and collectivist ways of defining the
self influence many aspects of life, including:
– which personality traits we value
– how and whether we express emotions
– how much we value having relationships or maintaining
freedom, and
– how freely we express angry or aggressive feelings
• Even the “Big Five” traits that occur universally
show variations within different cultures.
• People often attribute another person’s actions to
individual personality traits when they are really
due to cultural norms.
• Cultures vary in their norms for many behaviors,
such as:
– cleanliness
• Children, like adults, live in two environments:
their homes and their world outside the home.
• At home, children learn how their parents want
them to behave and what they can get away with.
• At school, however, they conform to their peers’:
– dress
– habits
– language
– rules
• Peers play a tremendous role in shaping our
personality traits and behavior.
• They can cause us to emphasize some attributes
or abilities and downplay others.
• Of course, our temperaments and dispositions
also cause us to select particular peer groups.
• Likewise, our temperaments influence how we
behave within the group.
• Many qualities that Western psychologists treat as
individual personality traits are heavily influenced
by culture.
• People from individualist cultures define
themselves in different terms than those from
collectivist cultures.
– In individualist cultures, the independence of the
individual often takes precedence over the group.
– In collectivist cultures, the self is defined in the context
of relationships and the community.
• Individualist and collectivist ways of defining the
self influence many aspects of life, including:
– which personality traits we value
– how and whether we express emotions
– how much we value having relationships or maintaining
freedom, and
– how freely we express angry or aggressive feelings
• Even the “Big Five” traits that occur universally
show variations within different cultures.
• People often attribute another person’s actions to
individual personality traits when they are really
due to cultural norms.
• Cultures vary in their norms for many behaviors,
such as:
– cleanliness
