Personality development Essay

Personality development can be described as the collection of a persons behaviours, for example their thoughts, emotions and interactions with others. As much(prenominal), researchers have often stressed the importance of social interactions and the environment on the development of personality. Banduras social-cognitive theory would describe the attainment of personality in call of modelling, bread and butter and direct tuition.Particular emphasis is placed on modelling, whereby a person identifies with a model and imitates their behaviour (and hence their personality traits). This may let off why siblings may have similar personalities, as they forget have shared a common environment for a large part of their earlier lives. Support for modelling as an influence on behaviour comes from Banduras Bobo doll studies, which found that children imitated the behaviour of an adult acting aggressively towards a doll.This demonstrates that reinforcement is not a necessary condition for personality development to take place, and is therefore an improvement on traditional learning theory. The process of modelling requires a number of cognitive factors to take place, but grouchyly important, according to Bandura, is motivation. This can take place by means of reinforcement or self-motivation, the latter having particular significance in personality development.Self-motivation covers a variety of self-evaluative cognitive processes, such as self-response (rewarding or punishing oneself for offering out a behaviour) and self-efficacy (the perception of capability to carry out a behaviour). This holds particular imnportance in personality development as personality is, according to social learning theory, learnt as is any other behaviour, and traits such as social skills may be obtained by, for example, watching ones parents socialise.If self-efficacy is low, the child may not imitate the behaviour, and as a result will have poor social skills as an adult. Feltz provi des support for the importance of self-efficacy, finding that Russian athletes performance was improved when they saw videotapes of themselves that had been edited to make them seem fall apart than they were. Further support is provided by Schunk, who found that American primary school children who were told that their peers had done well on a maths test proceeded to do improve on it that those who were not told anything about their peers.