APPROACHES TO PERSONALITY There are other approaches to personality that are not considered Neo-Freudian. Behaviorists do not see personality as being biological. They believe that environment was the only thing that shapes behavior and that people behave in certain ways. According to behaviorists, personality is not fixed in childhood but develops throughout one s life. The social-cognitive theories were first suggested by Albert Bandura. With this theory, it is believed that environment and cognition are sources of one s personality. There is the concept of reciprocal determinism, which argues that cognition, behavior, and context interact with one another and influence one another. Cognition is everything that has been learned, while context refers to the situation or environment. Other theories proposed by Bandura were that learning is largely vicarious, which is referred to as observational learning or modeling. Another is self-efficacy, which is a person s level of confidence in their own abilities. High self-efficacy involves believing that one s goals are reachable and that tasks can be mastered. Julian Rotter developed the idea of locus of control, which is the belief that a person has control over his or her own life. Some people have an internal locus of control, while others have an external locus of control. People who have an internal locus of control do better in their careers, are more independent, do better academically, are less depressed, and are better able to cope. Another personality theorist was Walter Mischel felt that a person s behaviors were inconsistent among different circumstances but was consistent within the same circumstances. His ideas mainly focused on self-regulation, which was identifying a certain set of goals and achieving them using internal and external feedback. Selfregulation is also called will power. Children with better self-regulation did better in school and had better relationships with fewer problems in the area of substance abuse. There are also humanistic views on personality development. Robert Maslow was a humanist and we have already talked about his hierarchy of needs. Rogers, on the other hand, felt that self-concept was important, which is to answer the question of who am
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