It fits your personality is a phrase that is often used by many people and can it can be referring to many different things. There are many different interpretations of a person’s personality. Even though some people may act alike, everyone has their own individual personality that they have made. A human’s personality has many different characteristics and over the years while growing up their personality grows. From infancy to adulthood humans learn and feed off of things to help their personality grow to become what it is. Personality, to name a few things, can be referring to the way you walk, talk, act, dress, your learning ability, your source of motivation and your emotions. All these things are huge parts of your personality and make you what you are. Personality has many different definitions none of these definitions are universal to any extent. Mischel Shoda Smith, in his book Introduction To Personality, says, “In popular usage, personality is often equated with social skill and effectiveness. In this usage, personality is the ability to elicit positive reactions from other people in one’s typical dealings with them.”(3) From this view personality is interpreted as the impression of yourself that you give people. For example if someone says you have a “shy personality” then you probably seem to be a shy person which reflects a trait of your personality. Even if they refer to you as someone with “ a lot of personality” then they may be saying you have a personality that reflects a lot of different things and different traits.
While growing up, a person’s personality develops and grows to its potential as the person is exposed to more things. All over the world there are billions of people with extremely diverse personalities. Many different things cause this extreme diversity in people’s personality. The different parts of your lifestyle can affect traits of the personality. Even though traits are gained by lifestyle, sometimes, some parts of a human’s personality can be obtained biologically and genetically.
There are many different biological parts of your personality; some people gain more traits than others. The biological part of your personality is also known as temperament. Temperament is what we call that part of our personalities or characters that is built-in to us genetically. In his book, The Science of Personality, Lawrence A. Pervin defines temperament by saying “…individual differences in general mood or quality of emotional response, typically assumed to be largely inherited, biologically based…”(56) One trait that is obtained biologically is a type of motivation. This is shown by a main function of all people. This motivation is caused by your need for something. For example, all humans get hungry and when they get hungry they want and need to eat. They become motivated to do something to stay in health and survive. This is also true with the need of air. When infants are born they automatically began to breath of their own and everyone breaths as a natural habit that is part of their biologically given personality.
With the wants and needs, such as drinking because you are thirsty, there are other things that humans are motivated by. What do most humans do as a natural instinct(which is also a part of personality)? Humans all do this because it is the first this that come to their mind. It’s not quick thinking but it is pain-avoidance. The need to avoid pain is something done by most people. When something is coming toward you the first thing you would want to do is avoid it if you know this will cause pain. Benjamin B. Wolamn explains an example of this brilliantly in his book Personality
Dynamics. He says, “…humans are reasonably well prepared to cope with danger because their first thought is to get out of the way.”(75) This basically supports the theory that humans always want to avoid pain or, even as he put it, danger. Avoidance is a natural instinct.
Natural instinct is another part of the human personality. The natural instincts of humans in some cases are biological and in other cases they are acquired as a person grows from being an infant to an adult. Natural instinct is always shown when there is danger and sometimes in other cases. The avoidance of pain is a natural instinct but it is not the only one. The want and need to breathe again is a natural instinct that is acquired biologically, also fear is an example of natural instinct but the things you fear are aquired as you grow up. Other forms and characteristics of a person’s natural instinct are gained while going through life.
This is where the fact of a human’s life style affecting their personality comes into the picture of the development of personality. The best way of giving examples of these traits is to give different examples and show how things turn out. If a person grows up eating only what we know as “regular food” they will grow to like it and have an acquired taste for it. If this same person were given food from another country that looks different or has something this person is not use to eating, their natural instinct would tell them not to eat this food.
If they were offered something such as the eyeballs of an animal, which in some countries are considered to be a delicacy, they would think this is gross or something that would make them sick, their stomach might even turn and they might want to vomit if they ate this. The natural instinct of their personality told them this food is not good and their body due to their personality rejected this food. Other people that grew up eating foods like this could happily eat this and they would not react the same was because they grew up eating this and their natural instinct told them that this is a good food to eat. Natural instinct is not the only trait of the human personality that is affected by the lifestyle of human.
Humans have many different traits to their personality and all these traits develop according to the lifestyle they have. Even if it may not seem like it everything affects the human personality is some way or another. Major things, such as the society the person grows up in, the music they listen to, their house hold, things they see and learn, and even color, all may effect a person’s personality. Even though these things may seem simple, they are major ingredients to the development of ones personality. This is called the learning part of your personality. There are many different types of “learning” that the personality goes through. The learning that the personality goes through are environmental learning, social learning, and verbal learning.
Environmental learning is basically getting feedback from your environment and taking what is around you into your thoughts and making them apart of yourself. Social learning involves learning by watching the thing around you and learning all the values and moral codes of life. It is basically like environmental learning but you must take a closer look at it. In this type of learning you view every little detail and try to mirror that in one way or another. The last form of learning is verbal learning. Verbal learning is learning not word of others instead of from the environment or socially.
All of these learning strategies have something in common. All humans use something called a copying strategy when developing personality. They some times copy things that come into contact with one of their senses. This refers to you senses meaning things such that they see or hear. Learning strategies are one of the main theories that are being taken into consideration for the development of the human brain and well as the personality. Learning strategies are based on the things that are around you. If the things around you are different, what you learn will be different. If two different people, that were exposed to different lifestyles, were compared it can be shown how much these things effect your personality.
A child that grew up in a rough neighborhood in New York City would have a different personality from a child, with the same age and race, which grew up in a quiet neighborhood in Long Island. Just from the description of the neighborhoods you can conclude that the first child would be rough and the second child would be a quiet person. Also from knowledge of neighborhoods such as these the rougher first child might have more of an urban look to them. The second child might have a more upper class look and style of dressing to them. The way these two children talk even though they maybe children of the same age would be different.
We know all children talk slang and speak different than they are usually suppose to. Even with this in common the slang these kids talk may be two different dialects of slang. They might use different words and different phrases that mean the exact same thing. These children even with age and race in common might have ended up with different slang terms simply because of the huge difference in societies they grew up in.
Environmental learning is a huge part of this situation. The two environments that are total different produced two different personalities. The rough environment produced a rough personality and the quiet calm environment produced a quiet and totally different personality. This shows that environmental learning is a huge part of the development of personality. Even though environmental learning is important it is just one of the many thing that make your personality.
It may not seem like it but music is a very major part of every body’s life. The rhythm that music give people is a very amazing thing. Even though the rhythm that music gives people is important, music also gives people personality. The feeling music gives people may affect the way people walk, talk, and even the way they dress. Even though music may not affect all the people that listen to it in all those ways, in one way or another it does. If you look at a person that listens to a lot of classical music and, they might be what you call a “suit and tie person.” Meaning exactly what it basically says, they like to dress up in suits and ties and like to look very classy. Their forms of speech would be very proper and they would use proper grammar. This is not always the outcome but the fact is that sometimes it may be. Even without words classical music still may have this effect because its more of the feeling and vibe of the music that people like instead of the lyrics.
The next type of person you will observe is a person that listens to rap music. Again this person is the same age and race as the last person. This person falls right into the common rap music stereotype. He dresses very loose with jeans and shirts that are way to big for them. He tries to keep up with the latest young urban fashions and sneakers and they clothes in their closet are something that is very important to them. He might talk a rough slang and have a rhythm to their talk. Cursing would be a huge part of his speech and used often when he talks among close friends.
This effect that music has on the people that listen to it has a lot to do with the content in the music itself. If you listen to rap music you will know you will notice that if glorifies a lot of things. It makes it look like cars and jewelry and clothes are most important. This message that these things are important can affect the personalities of the people that listen to the music. They may take the message and feel that they must dress this way and wear jewelry to fit into the rap field to complete that part of their personality. In rap music they curse a lot and use a lot of slang and powerful language and this is why the people that listen to if use the same type of language and slang terms.
The effect that the rap music has on your personality expresses the copying strategy that humans use unknowingly to develop personality. This also expresses verbal learning that is apart of your personality. You hear words and easily began to enter them into your vocabulary. It is kind of like how a child learns to talk, but not instead of learning how to talk you began to learn different ways to talk. A lot of children began to talk and say basically the same words. How they say these words and change them around depends on how they hear them. This perfectly illustrates the part of your personality that deals with the learning strategy.
Do you know what personality theorist believe is the main reason for your emotions, motivations, learning ability and social skill are? If you think that it’s your childhood experiences, you are right. Your childhood experiences are the reason, but not just any experiences. The experiences you have with your family in your household are what affect you most. How your parents and family treat you, what type of environment it is that you live in and how much you accept this; all these things somewhat affect the development of your personality. Also childhood experiences such as abuse, neglect, poverty, sickness, parent's sicknesses or death, divorce, immigration, accidents, and deformities affect personality development.
When children are growing up, most of the time they have some one showing them what is right and what is wrong. When a child is bad their parent or guardian punishes them for what he has done to help them notice what he did was wrong. When that child does something good then his parent rewards them to let them know it was the right thing to do. From this that child socially learns all the right and wrong things that he is suppose to do in life. While young if this child experiences something tragic such as an accident or something of that sort then he will have the support of his family to overcome this. They call the personalities ability to overcome something like this, positive regard. As long as a child has someone to teach them, all factors, except biological, that affect personality may not be affective.
Now lets say there is a child who has parents that were divorced and the parent that they live with works a lot. This child will not have the same privileges as the child that had his parent to tell him what is right. Not use to having someone around to talk to this child may become anti-social. This child might not be able to learn all the right and wrong things in life to do because he does not have the attention and time from his parent that a child needs. He might not know certain things that a child of their age should. He might not even know that much of his native language or how to talk simply because he did not have the chance to learn. His parent not being around defiantly affects his personality. This expresses the fact that a child’s family has an affect on his personality.
If a child is neglected or abused then they may began to look at all people in a very different way. Not only will he look at other people in a different way but he may began to feel bad about himself. He might develop low self-esteem or even have a poor self-concept. This is where he begans to have a very shy personality and keep to themselves. They may also began to not trust other people simply because the have the concept in them that humans are bad and they should avoid them. This is where many different types of personality trait and development methods come into play. They learn, not knowingly as the personality does, that they can not trust some people. This becoming natural to him he began to avoid people and try to keep to himself out of danger. Dr. C. George Boeree, in The Ultimate Theory of Personality, expresses this by saying “Confronted with the difficulties of life, lacking in the support of others, and not even enjoying confidence in ourselves, we find we must defend ourselves however we can.” With that said you can see that with one little thing happening, many different components of the personality are affected.
People who have grown up not neglected or abused by anyone may not develop a fear of people. They would have no reason to and no remembrance or reasoning to fear anyone. Throughout their memory no part of their personality would have learned that others would abuse them. Instead of their natural instinct telling them to avoid people it may tell them to embrace people and accept them. If your personality does not learn something then what you do not learn will not affect you, you will have a very different reaction than someone who has learned from something.
How all people look at themselves affect the way other people look at them and accept them. With that said and thinking of the definition of personality, how you look at yourself will affect your personality. If you do not have a positive view of yourself then people will not have a positive view of you. If you look at someone that is very confident, you can see that they are very liked by others because they think positive of themselves. Even though some people may seem confident they may be using their defense mechanisms to hide their true feelings, this is something that is very noticeable. They may use denial basically avoiding the true fact. A person like this will not have a very good personality.
Personality is something that is affected by all the things around you. You live your life everyday learning new thing. Not only is your brain and knowledge developing but your personality is also developing. “How and why people tend to think, feel, and behave and what causes these tendencies?” is the question asked in Great Ideas In Personality. This is a question that simply can be answered by saying one thing. It all matters on all the things that help to develop their personality. Not every human will end up the same with the same personality. Some people may end up similar but never the same. Everyone has that difference in them and is a very different and unique person because of their personality. They may come from the same neighbor hood or listen to the same music and develop similar traits. Overall they experience something different and learn something different that will make their personality something different.
Work Cited List
Pervin, Lawernce A. The Science of Personality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc, 2003.
Smith, Mischel S. Introduction to Personality. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2004.
Wolman, Benjamin B. Personality Dynamics. New York, NY: Plenum Press 1992.
Boeree, George C. The Ultimate Theory of Personality. Personality Theories. 2000. Online. Internet. 3 December 2004. http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/conclusions.html
Acton, Scott G. Great Ideas In Personality. 1997-2004. Online. Internet. 14 December 2004. http://www.personalityresearch.org/
