- Du Bois was heavily influenced by the work of Abram Kardiner and Ralph Linton. Following the Basic Personality Construct of Kardiner, Cora Du Bois also formulated a similar construct which she named ‘Modal Personality’ involving a more statistical concept.
- The basic personality is expressed in the most frequent type of patterned individual behaviour observed in a society. She assumed that a certain personality structure occurs most frequently within a society, but that it is not necessarily common to all members of that society. Modal personality defined as the personality typical of a culturally bounded population, as indicated by the central tendency of a defined frequency distribution.
- To develop the concept of modal personality Kardiner gathered data through psychological tests, which include projective tests Rorschach, or “ink-blot” test, and the TAT (or Thematic Apperception Test). TAT consists of pictures that the respondents are asked to explain or describe. The above tests combined with observation of frequency of certain behaviours, collection of life histories and dreams, and analysis of oral literature. Incidentally, Kardiner did not have the kind of data he needed to prove his theory.
- To overcome this handicap, Cora Du Bois went to Alor Island in the Dutch East Indies where she collected variety of ethnographic and psychological data. When she returned in 1939 she along with Kardiner analysed the data and arrived at the same conclusions about basic characteristics of Alorese personality. On the basis of this work she proposed ‘modal personality’ by which she meant the statistically most common personality type.
- She published the findings of her research on Alor in the year (1945) under the title The People of Alora: A Social Psychological Study of East Indian Island.
- For her research purpose, she spent almost eighteen months on the island of Alor, in eastern Indonesia. Her experiments were of three kinds:
- 1) She collected information on child-rearing;
- 2) She collected eight biographies, each with dream material; and
- 3) She administered a broad range of projective tests –the Rorschach test to thirty-seven subjects, a word-association test to thirty-six subjects, and a drawing test to fifty-five children.
A rather unfavourable modal personality for the Alorese emerged from this manysided investigation. Alorese of both sexes are described by Du Bois and her colleagues as suspicious and antagonistic, prone to violent and emotional outbursts, often of a jealous nature. They tend to be uninterested in the world around them, slovenly in workmanship, and lacking an interest in goals. Kardiner drew attention to the absence of idealised parental figures in the life stories. Oberholzer noted the lack of capacity for sustained creative effort, indicated by his reading of the Rorschach scores. Schmidt-Waehner identified a lack of imagination and a strong sense of loneliness in the children’s drawings. Turning to the possible causative influences, Du Bois and her co-researchers focused on the experiences of the Alorese during infancy and early childhood, up to the age of six or so. At the root of much of Alorese personality development, they suggested, is the division of labour in that society. Women are the major food suppliers, working daily in the family gardens, while men occupy themselves with commercial affairs, usually the trading of pigs, gongs and kettledrums. Within about two weeks after giving birth, the mother returns to her outdoor work, leaving the infant with the father, a grandparent, or an older sibling. She deprives the newborn child of the comfort of a maternal presence and of breat-feeding for most of the day. The infant thus experiences oral frustration and resultant anxiety. At the same time, the baby suffers bewildering switches in attention, from loving and petting to neglect and bad-tempered rejection. Thus, maternal neglect is viewed as being largely responsible for the Alorese personality