Personality and Self-Concept

Personality! What is it? And how do we “Gain” a Personality?

Personality is a collection of emotion, thought and behaviour patterns which make a person who they are. The personality of a person will be made up either through their Nature, Nurture or Birthing order. 

Nature argument would be that we have already been assigned as who we are going to be before we are even born through our characteristics and our DNA and as we get older these things come into play more and more. Scientist state that a person’s personality never changes, your views or opinions on things never change but the person you are will never change completely therefore people stay the same.

Nurture is the way in which you have been brought up, the ethics which you family stand for i.e. what’s right and what’s wrong. This means that your parents or the people around you will have an input into whom you are or who you will become. Therefore if there are more than one child within the family and if they were brought up in exactly the same way as his or her brother or sister shouldn’t they contain the same personality?

 

Birthing Order can have an effect on the personality the child will have. The oldest tend to be more responsible and reliable and a figure to look up towards whereas the youngest tend to be naughty or and attention seeking. This only happens some of the time, as this can vary depending on different people, sometimes they swap roles where you see the oldest acting out and attracting attention to themselves for the wrong reason and the youngest behind the quite hide behind the door type of person who just want to keep themselves to themselves.

I personally believe that all of the above have an impact on who you become, nature sets out the building blocks through Characteristics that come from your parents and therefore that’s why so many of us are compared to our parents in different means not just based on appearance also based on what type of personality you have. Nurture comes into play as you are growing up the people around you will teach you different times and this will shape you into the person you become. And personally I believe that birthing order has the least effect on your personality but will sometimes effect on how people will behave key example: Children which have been used to being the only child will “act up” to try and gain some of the attention which the parents or other friends and relatives are showing to the new addition to the family.

 

 Self Concept 

We all have an idea in mind of what we’re like and what we think we’re like, yet soon as someone switches on the camcorder 9/10 people would say “I don’t sound like that” me included. Our self concept of ourselves may be completely different to what other think of you. As people we are never satisfied with what we have, even though we could in a highly better position the less fortunate people we still seek for more. We all are insecure in one manner or the next as we all have things we wish we had or things we wish we could change therefore our self perception of ourselves could be slightly different to what we really are.