Culture of Character to Culture of Personality

In the Culture of Personality, people focus on how others perceived them and aspire to be bold and entertaining. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer,” Warren Sussman, influential cultural historian, famously wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.” As opposed to the Culture of Character where “the ideal self was serious, disciplined and honorable”. People value not so much as the impression they make in public but as how they behave in their privacy. The word personality weren’t even invented until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.¹

A shift from the Culture of Character to the Culture of Personality brings new wave of cultural ideals# from which we would never quite recover.