The process, structure and development of human personality have been molded over thousands of generations ago with the help of sexual and natural selection (Buss, 1991). Personality in this context highlights a meta-category of the output of species-typical, domain-specific and evolutionary. Personality is psychologically designed to response to social adaptive issues faced even by one’s ancestor throughout the evolution of man. This rationale of human personality gives valuable re-orientation of several aspects of personality psychology particularly on individual differences, similarities and sexual differences.
Observable in today’s society, species change over time. Their evolution is not only seen in physical and anthropological aspects but as well as personality. In today’s younger generation, for example, media plays a crucial role in developing people’s attitude and behavior. It dictates on how people look at each other, their ethics and even general worldview. As such, personality is shaped based on trends and it impacts people’s mindset and overall life outlook.
Plomin and Buss Model of Personality
Plomin& Dunn (1986) explained that temperaments are regarded as subclass of personality traits. There are three personality traits linked to it namely- appearance during the first year of life, persistence later in life and the contribution of heredity (Plomin& Dunn, 1986). The concept of temperament has been long viewed as one of the sources of biologically-anchored individual differences. It impacts how individuals interact with others, how they adapt to circumstances and overall attitude towards development. It leads to individual differences particularly in normative behavior. Plomin and Buss, in summary, proposed a model that is genetic-centered. In order to prove their theory they assessed twins to quantify genetic contributions to individual variances. The proposition of the two shows how genetically-centered temperament traits interact with the external environments in order to predict socio-emotional competence (Plomin& Dunn, 1986).
Rotter’s Locus of Control
Rotter introduced the Locus of Control and identified it as the degree to which individuals have control over the outcome of their lives as opposed to other external forces which are beyond their control (Rotter, 1966). People who have strong locus of control believe that circumstances in their lives are derived from their own actions. Also, people with strong external locus of control either praise of blame external factors and their abilities based on the outcome of their actions. On the other hand people with internals tend to link hard work with good results/positive outcomes. As such they also believe that consequence root from their actions that is why it is easier for them to accept.
Extraversion and Introversion
The personality dimensions of extraversion and introversion are argued to be genetically-rooted. The preference of people influence how the brain responds to the world. This is studied by psychologists Hans Eysenck when he introduced the influential proposal that extroverts are identified by having a chronically lower level of arousal (Stafford, 2013). Conversely, highly introverted people find themselves overstimulated by things other people might label as merely engaging (Stafford, 2013).
Bandura’s Self-Efficacy
Bandura (1994) defines self-efficacy (or confidence) as the belief in one’s innate ability to achieve goals. Furthermore, Bandura (1994) mentioned that the people’s beliefs about their efficacy can be developed through the help of four major sources namely mastery of experience, strengthening beliefs, modeling influences and social persuasion.
Sex Difference
One example of cognitive sex difference is found in memory. There are literature attempting to determine the differences in the short-term memory of women and men. Results of different studies reveal that women scored higher on verbal sub-tests centering on object recall and world selective reminder on the hand, males scored higher on abstract visual memory and memory for location. As a result, women perform higher on verbal activities while men perform better on spatial tasks. An example of social sex-difference is in terms of educational achievement. Some studies reveal that men achieve more compared to women and as a result, men have higher chances of holding leadership positions in the future. These differences are anchored on norms, nurturance and affiliation meaning that these differences change depending on the context where the individual is raised. Written by professional writing services.
