Approaches to Personality

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

I?”. the self is divided into two categories: the ideal self, which is who you want to be, and real self, which is who you really are. If one has similar thoughts about each category, this is when one is the healthiest. Incongruence, however, involves maladjustment.

There is a biological basis behind personality, according to the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Identical twins, even when reared apart, have similar personality styles. There are likely many different genes, plus epigenetic factors, which are those things that control whether or not a gene is expressed.

Temperament is largely biological. There are babies that are easy, hard, or slow to warm up, which later affects their personality. There are two factors that affect personality. These are reactivity and self-regulation. Reactivity involves how a person responds to a new environment, while self-regulation is the ability to control one s response to their environment. Some people are anxious in a new environment, while others do not really notice it.

The trait theorists believe that certain traits can together identify what a person s personality is. There are three categories of personality traits. These are cardinal traits, central traits, and secondary traits. Cardinal traits are the dominant ones in the entire personality. Central traits are also obvious but not as much as cardinal traits. Secondary traits are less obvious or consistent and are generally seen under certain circumstances. Raymond Cattell developed about 170 different traits a person can have.

There is also the five-factor model, which looks at five different traits and scores people on a continuum of these factors. The five factors are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Most people fall in the middle and do not have extremes in any of these factors. These traits are particularly stable throughout one s lifetime. These traits are basically the same across ages, cultures, and ethnicities.

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