Psychology
Factors Influencing Personality
Introduction:
Factor # 1. Biological Factors:
By and large, the influences of biological factors on personality
structure are limited and indirect.
The biological factors include genetic, hereditary factors, physical
appearance and physique and rate of maturation.
Most of these factors have been elaborately discussed in the chapter on
development in this book. For personality development, the
characteristics such as—aggressiveness, nervousness, timidity and
sociability are strongly influenced by genetic endowment.
The constitutional make-up—which is also largely determined by
heredity—influences a person’s personality characteristics and
influences his personality development in an indirect way. The
children reliably classified as active, moderately active or quiet are
actually the differences attributable to hereditary endowments,
although training and learning may produce noticable modifications.
Here, the environment and culture provide a decisive role.
The influence cast by the physical appearance and physique have been
thoroughly discussed on the section of physical development and
needs no repetition. Only thing to be pointed out is that any deficiency
in physical appearance or physique can be compensated by other
achievements made in the individual’s life.
The rate of maturing is another important factor in causing striking
variations at various ages at which the child reaches due to
chronological development. The differences in behaviour is noticeable
in the relatively mature or immature adolescents of the same age.
This difference may be due to the adolescent’s exposure to different
social-psychological environments. A late maturing boy looks younger
than his age and is likely to be regarded and treated as immature by
others, while the early maturing boy is likely to be credited with being
more grown-up socially and emotionally.
But a caution has to be considered in over-emphasizing the influence
of physical characters on personality development. Because, although
the rate of maturing and associated factors may affect personality
development, the relationship between physical make-up and
psychological characteristics is not very rigid and categorical. The
relationship can be influenced by a vast number of complex,
interacting factors determining the individual’s personality structure.
Factor # 2. Cultural Determinants of Personality:
From the point of view of personality development the most
significant aspect of the individual’s world is his social environment.
All human beings live in a society, an interacting group of people and
each society has a distinctive culture, a body of stored knowledge,
characteristic way of thinking, feeling attitudes, goals, ideals and value
system.
Culture regulates our lives and influences the development of
personality at every turn, primarily by prescribing and limiting what
he will be required to acquire for the development of his personality.
Such culture expects and trains its members to behave in the ways that
are acceptable to the group. Each culture has its own concepts, needs
and specific techniques of child rearing as well as a set of expectations
regarding patterns of approved behaviour.
There are cultural variations in the methods of achieving such goals as
to perpetuating the group and maintaining solidarity, or for satisfying
basic needs of its members. There are cultural prescriptions for
different types of child-rearing according to the necessity of the
various groups. Again, there are social class differences—children from
different socio-economic backgrounds differ in personality structure,
behaviour and attitudes.
They differ with respect to achievement motivation —the basic need
leading to success in life. Middle-class parents, in general, stress
achievement strongly, but lower- class parents do not. Sociological
analysis suggests that the lower-class child develops little capacity to
“delay gratification”, because, for him, the future is uncertain.
Therefore, the variation in social class leads to the setting of variety of
aim, modes and methods in developing social behaviour and, thereby,
cause individuals to vary in the development of personality.
Factor # 3. Family Influences on Personality Development:
The ultimate aim of personality development is the development of
social behaviour in children. Socialization is the process by which the
individual infant acquires the behavioural potentialities and,
eventually, those behaviour patterns that are customary and
acceptable according to the standards of his family and the social
group. He starts acquiring those patterns of social behaviour from the
immediate environment and gradually from the wide range of
extended environments.
The child’s first social learning occurs at home, and his earliest
experiences with his family, particularly his mother, are critical in
determining his attitude toward—and his expectations of—other
individuals. The mother remains most important to him because she
gratifies his primary needs for food, for alleviation of his pain and
source of pleasure, for warmth. The infant soon learns to search for
and approach his mother whenever he is hungry, in pain and
uncomfortable.
If the mother is nurturant and gratifies his needs promptly and
effectively, she rewards the child’s “approach” responses and these are
likely to be repeated. Positive approach responses then, gradually,
generalize to other people as well and the child develops positive social
attitude. As we have seen in Erikson’s theory that the earliest
interactions between mother and child lay the ground-work for child’s
development of trust and mistrust in the world. This leads to the trust
and mistrust to be generalized to trust others when the child grows up.
Almost all the theorists of personality development maintain that early
mother-child relationships influence not only a child’s immediate
behaviour but also his subsequent and long- term adjustment.
The child-rearing practices also are taken into account as influencing
the personality development. The parental attitude (in child-rearing
process) toward the child’s growing independence and their reactions
to exploration and the curiosity strongly influences the development of
important motives, like, curiosity, and the drives for autonomy,
independence, mastery, competence, and achievement, as well as
intelligence. This is evident from the different cross-cultural studies of
child-rearing practices and their influences on child behaviour.
Permissive and easygoing parents will allow their child to explore and
investigate freely, encouraging and rewarding his curiosity and
independent behaviour. As a result, their children will manipulate
their environment actively, thereby developing self-confidence,
spontaneity and the desire for mastery over their surroundings.
Parents who severely restrict their children in exploring and
manipulating their environment and inhibit the development of
motivation for autonomy will ultimately lead to the child’s dependent
behaviour. The same result yields when the mothers become over-
protective. The over-protected children tend to become submissive,
compliant and, sometimes, passive.
The impact of various types of home atmosphere on the personality
characteristics have been studied cross-culturally and the research
results show the children from democratic homes—which are
characterized by general permissiveness— frequent conversing with
children, emphasis on the child’s decision-making, problem-solving
and helping them to rationalize behaviour—lead to strengthening their
(children’s) ego-strength and strong self-concept in future.
By contrast, children brought up in the authoritative (controlled,
restricted) homes, homes with clear-cut rules, prohibitions and
restrictions—tend to be quiet, well-behaved, shy, socially unassertive
children. Those from the highly “indulgent” homes, show almost same
behaviour, when they grow up, as shown by the restricted and
overprotected children.
Thus, it can be surmised that the traits developed throughout the
course of personality development depend, on the whole and in
general, on the interaction of the biological, cultural and social factors
and the congenial environment provided by the family and society.
The predictions given above (received from different research studies)
are only generalizations and not absolutely conclusive. Most of the
traits acquired by the child in future depend on many other factors he
encounters in his own life, his own perception and reactions to them.
A young child’s behaviour may be swayed by the reactions his peer
groups show to him. Personality change do occur frequently during
childhood because, at this stage, personality characteristics are not
fixed or immutable.
As his world expands, the child faces and encounters many new
situations and faces many a new social interactions that may produce
radical alterations in personality structure and behaviour. Even simple
social learning and formal training of attitudes and values in proper
learning situations like school and other institutions play important
role in influencing the personality change and development.
Needs and Importance:
In actual life, individual behavioral processes like learning,
motivation, memory, etc. do not occur independently and individually.
There is an integration and organization of these various processes
which gives a total meaning to the behavior of a person.
Further, this pattern or organization extends across situations, with
the result that every person behaves with a certain degree of
consistency and at the same time behaves in a manner different from
others. We may, therefore, say that even though we may study
individual processes like perception, learning, etc. these alone,
individually or taken together, cannot help us to understand, interpret
or predict the behavior of a person.
There are certain organizing and integrating processes which help to
combine and weave these individual processes into the behavior of a
person. This organization gives a sense of individuality or uniqueness
to the person’s behavior.
In psychology, the term personality is used to mean a hypothetical
construct or an agency which explains the integration of different
behavioral processes resulting in meaningful behavior in such a way so
as to make one person different from others. The term personality,
therefore, explains both generality, and individuality in behavior.
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