PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

An individual's personality is the complex of mental characteristics that makes them unique from other people.  It includes all of the patterns of thought and emotions that cause us to do and say things in particular ways.  At a basic level, personality is expressed through our temperament or emotional tone.  However, personality also colors our values, beliefs, and expectations.  There are many potential factors that are involved in shaping a personality.  These factors are usually seen as coming from heredity and the environment.  Research by psychologists over the last several decades has increasingly pointed to hereditary factors being more important, especially for basic personality traits such as emotional tone.  However, the acquisition of values, beliefs, and expectations seem to be due more to socialization and unique experiences, especially during childhood.

Some hereditary factors that contribute to personality development do so as a result of interactions with the particular social environment in which people live.  For instance, your genetically inherited physical and mental capabilities have an impact on how others see you and, subsequently, how you see yourself.  If you have poor motor skills that prevent you from throwing a ball straight and if you regularly get bad grades in school, you will very likely be labeled by your teachers, friends, and relatives as someone who is inadequate or a failure to some degree.  This can become a self-fulfilling prophesy as you increasingly perceive yourself in this way and become more pessimistic about your capabilities and your future.  Likewise, your health and physical appearance are likely to be very important in your personality development.  You may be frail or robust.  You may have a learning disability.  You may be slender in a culture that considers obesity attractive or vice versa.  These largely hereditary factors are likely to cause you to feel that you are nice-looking, ugly, or just adequate.  Likewise, skin color, gender, and sexual orientation are likely to have a major impact on how you perceive yourself.  Whether you are accepted by others as being normal or abnormal can lead you to think and act in a socially acceptable or marginal and even deviant way.

Are there Personality Types?

We often share personality traits with others, especially members of our own family and community.  This is probably due largely to being socialized in much the same way.  It is normal for us to acquire personality traits as a result of enculturation.  Most people adopt the traditions, rules, manners, and biases of their culture.  Given this fact, it is not surprising that some researchers have claimed that there are common national personality types, especially in the more culturally homogenous societies.  During the 1940's, a number of leading anthropologists and psychologists argued that there are distinct Japanese and German personalities that led these two nations to view other countries as trying to destroy them.

The concept of national personality types primarily had its origins in anthropology with the research of Ruth Benedict beginning in the 1920's.  She believed that personality was almost entirely learned.  She said that normal people acquire a distinct ethos, or culturally specific personality pattern, during the process of being enculturated as children.  Benedict went on to say that our cultural personality patterns are assumed to be "natural" by us and other personality patterns are viewed as being "unnatural" and deviant.  She said that such feelings are characteristic of all people in all cultures because we are ethnocentric.  Benedict compared the typical personalities of the 19th century North American Plains Indians with those of the farming Pueblo, Indians of the Southwest.  She  said that the bison hunting Plains Indians had personalities that could be typified as being aggressive, prone to violence, and seeking extreme emotional states.  In contrast, she said that the typical Pueblo Indian was just the opposite--peaceful, non-aggressive, and sober in personality.