versal laws of personality development, it is obvious that we must test
them in many different cultural contexts.
Multiculturalism grew out of a position called cultural relativism ,
which claimed that human values can only be judged from within theperspective of the culture in which they arose, because values are a cul-tural creation. From this perspective, we should not condemn theprecolonial Aztec people of Mexico for practicing human sacrifice, be-cause within their view of the world this was an act of piety , necessaryfor the propitiation of the gods and the continued survival of their soci-ety . Carried to an extreme, cultural relativism can be used to justify anyaction (like Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia in the name of socialism),but the basic idea that we should not simply assume that our views andvalues are the right ones is still powerful.
The ideas associated with cultural relativism were popularized by
anthropologists like Ruth Benedict (1934) and Margaret Mead (1928),who were among many psychologists, psychoanalysts, and sociologistsconcerned with the topic of culture and personality in the first half ofthe 20th century (McCrae, 2000b). Although there were certainly manyvariations (LeVine, 2001), the basic idea in this school of thought wasthat personality was shaped by culture, especially child-rearing prac -
tices. Because there were obvious and dramatic differences between cul -
tures, one could expect that there would be equally great differences
between the personality of, say , the Yanomamö of Venezuela and theBalinese of Indonesia. Further, because all Yanomamö shared a commonculture, they should also share a common personality , sometimes calledthemodal personality structure .
Personality assessment was in its infancy then, and most of the em -Cross-Cultural Views of Personality and Aging 85
FIGURE 3. Imagined inhabitants of the undiscovered world. From Hartmann
Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum , Nuremberg, Germany , 1493.