Determinants Of Personality: The personality of a person makes them unique. Students also join the personality development course which helps them in developing their personality. Meet the people who don’t like you and support others when they need you. It depends on a person how he shapes his personality.
There are four determinants of personality:
- Biological/ Physical Determinants: Hereditary and physical features
- Social Determinants: Sociological aspects related to the community
- Psychological Determinants: Behaviour, emotions, sentiments, thought patterns and complexes of an individual
- Intellectual Determinants: Value, Humour, Morality etc.
The ideal topics you will come across while reading this are :
- Understanding the Meaning of Personality
- Biological Factors
- Family Factors
- Cultural Factors
- Social Factors
- Situational Factors
- Personality Characteristics
- Determinants of Personality: How Psychometric Tests Help?
Understanding the Meaning of Personality
In the simplest word personality is an Individuals combination of characteristics, experiences, values, habits and the way an individual behaves which all together defines his or her behavioural manner is called personality. Now when we want to study personality Physiologist and social theorist have said that there are mainly two ways to do so which are sociological and physiological. Other than these two there can be an addition of biological approach but because it gives an Individual access to mainly biophysical characteristics, it is only used when there is a need to study a personality in a manner which is holistic or comprehensive.
Now let’s individually talk a little about both the main ways.
Sociological Approach: This approach examines an individuals behaviour and personality according to their social groups like the group of friends or community. What’s the main point of this approach is that what other people around us perceive indeed has a great and strong impact on the development of our personality.
Psychological Approach: This approach is one of the major determinants of personality. Ik this approach the specific style of an individual gets known by the Characteristics which are like sentiments, thought patterns, emotions, complexes etc. Furthermore, this approach also helps us studying an individuals sublimation, emotional well-being, an individual’s mental conflicts, aspirations, feelings of repression, wishes.
Biological Factors
The biological reason is one of the most important and effective factors that tell us about one’s personality. Although this tells us many other things as well and brings out many different behaviours from an individual which help us figure out their personality. Now under biology factor, there are some important Constituent which are :
- Physical Features: people often end up saying in quotes etcetera that physical appearance does not matter but it does. Your physical appearance tells a lot about your personality too like whether you are thin, tall, short, fat and other things like these matter but most importantly how you carry yourself, your appearance matters. This thing leaves a strong impression of an individual on others.
- Hereditary: The feature that can be seen from the conceptions time is put under this feature. Like for example, we can take features like facial features, height, sex, physical stature, muscle composition and temperature.
Family Factors
Among all the other factors that tell us about determinants of personality, the family factor is the most important one. The ambience we get at home builds from our parent’s behaviour and the behaviour of other people in our family gives the main contribution to the building of our personality. When we at an early age that time itself a very critical impact is driven on our personality by our family. Let’s take an example if a child is being brought up in a family where he has seen violent actions and such behaviour from his early age will be different in a way more emotional and maybe timid and affected by this than compared to the child who grew up in a healthy family.
According to the American-Australian Psychologist Walter Mischel’s theory the significance of parents and family about how they affect the determinants of one’s personality can be explained as :
- Often the inspiration of a child is to aspire to be like their parents.
- Identification can be done by seeing the child’s method of the way they take parts of personality from their parents.
- It can also be done by observing the behaviour that is similar to altitude and feelings between the child and the parent.
Cultural Factors
We know we are born with the biological determinants of personality within ourselves likewise, the determinants of personality around which we grow up are considered as the cultural determinants. Now while growing up the factors which make a real strong impact on our personality while growing up are like the way we are grown up rather raised, the rituals and norms of every family which is different for every individual’s family, the social group like friends and people we hang out with. All of these helps an individual to grow in a way and behave in a way which is accepted by our society. This becomes the main reason why things like independence, aggression, competition and cooperation are the main contributors to personality determination. Therefore we often see that Individuals who have been brought up in the Western countries have a completely different culture and are far apart from our personality when compared.
Social Factors
When we specifically look at the era rather than the modern 21st century we live in we see a widespread communication through social media. It is now a day to day part of every individual’s life. When we talk about social media there is no chance we can miss out the social media influencers who influence numerous people not just in a country or another but all around the globe. Now the point here is that by all this anyone’s personality is affected by the social life they are into or they follow. Now socializing itself leaves an impact on other individuals’ personalities to mark on your personality be it Socializing virtually or in real. This factor takes it’s the first step as soon as we step out from playschool along with it we step out from the fantasy world and enter the real world among the friends and other people we meet throughout our life. These reasons are enough why we are asked to choose our social circle very wisely because social dominants do affect our personality.
Situational Factors
Among all the factors we mentioned here for affecting our personality, a very important one to be mentioned about is situational factors. We are very much aware of this human nature that we humans react differently to every different situation. We shall not completely judge one’s personality based on situational factors but somehow it does reflect a person’s partial personality through the reaction given in a situation that he or she is in. For example, we can see that a person behaves differently when he or she is at home with their family, differently when he is at the club with his friends and differently when he is at the office with his boss.
Personality Characteristics
There is no determined set of Characteristics of personality. It varies with every individual. Sometimes it happens that we have the same behaviour of a person even after not having any blood relation and on the other hand sometimes even after having blood relation we don’t see any reflection of similar traits or mutual behaviour between us. Personality is unique for every individual. Keeping this in mind there are a few common characteristics of personality given below:
- Type A and Type B Personality
- Self Esteem
- Self Efficiency
- Self Monitoring
- Risk-Taking
- Locus of Control Positive/ Negative Affect
Determinants of Personality: How Psychometric Tests Help?
You must have come across this word psychometric analysis. This is usually used in career Counselling to know the student’s interests and skill or to screen candidates in for a job profile. This test is standard and Scientifically proven analysis used to know individuals behaviour and mental capabilities. This test examines the personality traits of an individual in this way.
This test is most important when it comes to career counselling for a student for Counsellor to find out students interest and skills so that it can help them choose the right way when they pursue their career. How is this test taken is the very vital question that arises when we talk about Psychometric tests. So this test consists of basic multiple-choice questions, there is no passing or failing in this test since these tests are designed to determine an individual personality. So this test makes choosing your streams after 10th or even after college or any right way to pursue a career very easy.
With this, we come to the end of brief information about the determinants of personality, some common characteristics of personality and also how the psychometric test can help you guide towards your career. Hope this helped you enough.
types of personality according to greeks:
- Sanguine: highly talkative, extrovert, enthusiastic
- Phlegmatic: quiet, easy-going, reserved
- Melancholic: deep thinkers
- Choleric: ambitious
Importance of studying about personality
It is very important for psychologists to study personality so that they can predict people’s response to a particular situation. It gives them a fairly good idea about what people generally value and prefer. It helps psychologists understand the reason behind a certain behaviour and whether or not it is good for the individual.
