Explain why an individual's personality tends to remain the same over a lifetime.
What will be an ideal response?
Personality influences a person's life choices and experiences, yet folk wisdom usually adheres to the opposite: that a personality in adulthood is influenced by events and experience over a lifetime. The logic goes that after a humiliating experience at a party, a person becomes more introverted and anxious about social gatherings. However, research suggests that experience rarely causes dramatic changes in personality and that instead, it is our personalities that influence our choices and experiences. That is, introverted and socially anxious people may be prone to find parties and social gatherings challenging-and in their distress they may behave in ways that increase the likelihood of humiliating experiences (e.g., grasping a cup too tightly and inadvertently spilling its contents). People choose behaviors, lifestyles, mates, and contexts based on their personalities, and then the outcomes of these choices and life experiences may strengthen and stabilize personality traits. In one study conducted over a 9-year period, social well-being correlated positively with extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness; and changes in social well-being coincided with changes in these traits. In this sense, stability of personality is influenced by individuals' behaviors and choice of environments as well as by environmental factors themselves.
Contextual factors play a role in stabilizing personality throughout adulthood as social, living, and working contexts and social roles, such as spouse or parent, become established and, for most people, are largely stable over adulthood contributing to continuity in personality and individual differences in personality. Dramatic life changes, such as divorce, serious illness, or widowhood may bring about new behaviors and patterns of traits, but more commonly such events evoke and strengthen existing patterns of traits. Personality traits can be expressed in many ways, depending on the situation and on the individual's personality makeup. Most people are motivated to maintain a stable sense of personality as part of developing and maintaining a consistent sense of self.
You might also like to view...
What principle describes the idea that adolescents are not only influenced by their parents but also influence their parents?
a. Reciprocal effects b. Binocular vision c. Unidirectionality d. Responsiveness
Why are stressors such as airplane crashes more stressful than a fire?
A) After a fire, people receive more social and financial support than after a crash. B) There is less publicity after a fire, so people don relive the experience over and over as they doin an airplane crash. C) People tend to take something like an airplane crash more personally than they do a fire. D) After a fire, people can often find some positive aspect, such as that the family survived or the fire didn spread it is harder to do this with an airplane crash.