Describe the findings of Adler, Horney, Allport, Cattell, and Erikson about the environmental factor that affects personality

What will be an ideal response?

ANS: Environmental influences continue to affect our behavior and personality throughout our life.
Adler spoke of the impact of birth order, arguing that personality is influenced by our position in the family relative to our siblings. We are exposed to different parental and social problems and challenges as a function of the age difference between our siblings, or whether we have siblings at all. In Adler's view, these different home environments can result in different personalities.

Horney believed that the culture in which we grow up can produce different effects, such as those she found in the different kinds of neuroses exhibited by her German and her American patients. She also pointed out the vastly different social environments to which boys and girls are exposed as children. She spoke of female inferiority developing from the way girls are treated in a male-dominated culture. She suggested that women raised in a matriarchal culture might have higher self-esteem and different personality characteristics.

Allport noted that although genetics supplies the raw material of personality, it is the social environment that shapes the material into the finished product. Cattell argued that heredity is more important for some of his 16 personality factors than for others, but environmental influences will ultimately affect every factor to some extent.

Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development are innate, but the environment determines the ways in which those genetically based stages are realized. He believed that social and historical forces influence the formation of ego identity.