What is Personality?
Most fundamentally, personality is the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. Personality is thought to emerge within the individual and remain fairly consistent throughout life. While there are many different definitions of personality, most focus on behavioral patterns and traits that can help predict and explain a person's behavior. Personality explanations can focus on a variety of influences, from genetic explanations of personality traits to the role of environment and experience in shaping an individual's personality (Aytaç, 2001). People have a tendency to describe their personality traits using adjectives in their daily lives. However, studies have shown that these adjectives are insufficient to explain our personality. In these studies, personality is considered by psychologists as a concept that plays a role in the development of human systems (Tett and Christiansen, 2007).
To successfully understand trait and social cognitive approaches, some clarity about what a personality trait means is necessary. Historically, there has been much definitional confusion regarding the concept of personality trait. As a starting point, it makes sense to consider personality and the person featured in the assessment. In most explanations of the social cognitive model, the concept of personality traits that emerge as a result of personality and evaluation is thought to be the 'invariance feature' (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). So, we can say that personality traits are defined as behaving the same way in different situations. An individual's personality is unique, personal, and a key determinant of his behavior. Due to personality differences, individuals differ in the way they respond to different situations. Some personality theorists emphasize the need to recognize person-situation interaction, that is, the social learning aspects of personality. Such an interpretation is quite meaningful for the study of human behavior (Soysal, 2008).
If you apply for a job, you will be asked to list your personal qualities. Employers assume that your personality is somewhat fixed and won't change much from one year to the next. Most of us can relate to this idea. We can build our personality, but where does our personality come from? Is it in our genes or is it created more by the circumstances of our childhood? Of course the answer is both. It is inevitable that there are genes that affect our behavior simply because our brain and the chemicals that work in it are made by genes. But trying to find any one of the hundreds of genes involved is notoriously difficult. The genetics of behavior are complex because personalities are complex. Scientists are just beginning to have success in understanding how genes influence behavior.
Factors Affecting Personality
As a result of many studies on personality formation and development; Experts support that the child's period until the age of 5-6 has a great impact on the formation of his personality. During this period, the child's inherited genetic characteristics and environmental factors come together and shed light on the formation of the child's unique character (Özdemir, 2012). While the genes a child receives from his or her parents generally play a role in the child's intelligence, character and abilities; The environment has an impact on the skills a child acquires by observing, such as eating and drinking habits. Of course, since the first environment the child meets is his mother and father, the concept of parents has a great impact on the child's personality development as both a genetic and environmental factor.
Read: 0
