Essay on Personality Psychology: Examining Individual Differences in Personality

Introduction

Personality tend to change and can be defined as a vigorous and systematized set of individual characteristics possessed individually by everybody. These individual characteristics majorly influences the person's surroundings, understandings, sentiments, inspirations, and behaviors in different situations. Therefore, personality psychology as a branch of psychology can be defined as the examination of personality and the difference seen among the persons (Bandura, 2018). Personality therefore tends to try to check on the factors below in depth: first is creation of a steady picture about an individual and the psychological processes that affect them, doing a study of the person's psychological differences, and investigation the nature of humans as well as comparing the possible similarities between individuals.

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The Modelling Theory

Modeling theory is part the psychological theories that can be used in theoretical analysis. Modelling is a theory heavily emphasizes on observing the actions of others then from those actions you will be able to change your behavior in relation to the exemplary behavior from someone else. In the modelling theory there are stages that are followed in the process where an individual decides to follow the behavior of another. This theory is the main idea as presented by Albert Bandura. These characteristics are mainly portrayed in media such as the influence in one way or another they share things in common (Bandura, 2018).

First as Albert Bandura explains, the individual has to pick the behavior by just seeing an action. The action is from the model from the media. They then identifies with the actor, they share similar with the individual in broader sense. This theory is the main idea as presented by Albert Bandura. These characteristics are mainly portrayed in media such as the influence in one way or another they share things in common. Then the viewer the goes ahead and copy the actions of the actor by imitating their behavior. The last stage is the viewer getting motivated after the activity is rewarded or gets advantage as a result of performing the action. Media is always both sided with both the negative and the positive traits. This means that there is a possibility of a negative trait being portrayed and then the individual may change and stop it when they get a punishment or they fail go get the rewards. This is what completes philosophy, the theories are interdependent due the fact studying man is complex you will not understand at once. Therefore there has to be more than one psychological ways to help understand human behaviors. Modelling is there to complement the other methods hence addressing the issue fully. Psychologists have to employ more than method in the process of their work.

To have a better understand psychology and personality, it is important to understand the characteristics of personality and personality can therefore possess the following characteristics as follows; to begin with is the consistence and organization of personality, this means that humans tend to portray certain type of personality during different situation that tend to face to face them in life in this essence the characteristics portrayed are always similar or there is some consistency in the personality too on the situations in that the individual will always possess the same characteristics when placed under the same situation every time.

The second characteristic is on the stability of the personality in that despite the fact that personality is stable environment can influence it in one way or another to make it change. The situation will make one change their characteristic for good or either during that single event alone. For an example a shy person will note open in public but immediately they notice an emergency they may become proactive and speak out about it. The last characteristic is the contribution of personality on behavior change. Since one reacts to different situations differently, it will eventually lead to them being known or their actions hence behavior.

The Mediation Process

Bandura explains that an individual has to go through some process before he or she fully accepts the behavior change as a result of observation. Therefore, he proposed four mediational processes that have to be followed to fully gain the modeling theory. The first one is attention; for a behavior to stick into our minds and be stored the individual has to have paid some attention into it. This is because we must meet several individuals portraying several behaviors but one cannot get to take these behaviors since they have not paid any attention to them. Secondly, is the retention power, this is described in the rate at which the individual is a le to retain the information.

When a behavior is noticed and one later fails to remember it, it will eventually prevent imitation. Reproduction is the third part and it entails the power to repeat the behavior exactly as the individual had done. However most of the time we might not be able to always imitate these behaviors. Some of them are just imaginations since we are not physically capable of doing it. Taking for an example the ice skating activity and a 90 year old lady. She would actually be impressed with it as it is enjoyable to watch and to do it but because of her physical ability she would never try it.

Once the behavior has been tried, motivation is what follows. This is because motivation comes as a result of the reward or punishment that follows the behavior. If the perceived rewards will be much better than the perceived costs then the behavior will definitely have high chances of being replicated.

Comparing Modeling with Other Theories

In order to evaluate and analyze the use of personality theories in the contemporary relevance we need to first get a gist of what these theories are. Thus, there are four major types of personality theories which include; psychoanalytic, humanistic, trait and social cognitive. To begin with psychoanalytic theories are those that were developed by Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. This theory revolves around those that are intended to bring an understanding by looking at the individual's unconscious mind and the desires embedded in an individual. These desires and the state of unconscious mind tend to impact on how people tend to spend their lives. Though the experiences and pressure of the social life as well and the subconscious needs of the individual that are geared towards self-realization, the unconscious mind is developed.

The second theory is the humanistic theory that is that need for self-actualization and satisfaction of the needs present since it is a dynamism behind behavior. This is where the hierarchy of needs fall under it was developed by Abraham Maslow and in his description he stated the basic needs that drive human behaviors. One will shift to more hire hierarchy of needs once the basic needs are met more consistently, hence will require more desires. The third theory is the trait theory and tries to identify the particular traits that are the foundations of the various personality types and behaviors of individuals.

Lastly is the social cognitive theory or modeling the one under discussion, which as stated above explains the personality as the outcome that comes as a result of a long time observation and learning from the observations. In this sense the individuals tend to choose behaviors that are rewarded at the end and those that are punished they avoid. In reality this is what learning is all about people tend to learn from examples. They tend to imitate and follow the steps followed by successful individuals while shunning away from behaviors that caused harm, loss or lead to punishment to an individual close to them. This however does not prove the theory are the only relevant theory since there are other several factors that are considered in this sense.

The above theories show behavioral change in a different perspective of life as stated. But one common thing about all the theories is that they tend to complement each other where one leaves a gap, another bases its strengths on the gaps left and rarely do you find them clashing against one another. Therefore, there is no outstanding that has been accepted universally as the best and the most relevant but instead the psychologists employs all of them at the same time to effectively understand behavior and the behavior patterns. This shows how difficult human behaviors are to comprehend since one must involve more than one means (David, 2019).

The Validity of the Theory

How valid is the theory, in this excerpt the validity of this theory has been proven several times from daily lives in the contemporary world. The situation at the current moment shows that many people especially the young adults and the teen agers have fallen for this trap. They tend to have many role models from the media especially from the movie and the music industry part of the media (Allan, 2017). There are several things that are in our daily lives that were learnt subconsciously, according to bandura, giving an examples, some who has never played baseball even once in life given such an opportunity of having a baseball bat and a ball flying towards them.

They definitely would have an idea on what to do, how did this person come to know this yet they are having baseball for the first time in their lives? Probably somewhere they have been watching a movie, a song or watching the game over the media and now they know what to do (Light & Butterworth, 2016). And it does not mean they watched it to learn it may be accidental that they found the game since it was part of a movie script and that they did not want to even care about knowing it at the moment but the subconscious mind which is a very important part of the modeling process picked it up and it was now in their system. It is now then that the reflex action in the mind is bringing out the skills learnt subconsciously.

In contrast with other theories that state that learning must be followed by reinforcement for it to become effective, Bandura states that this is not always the case as he proves that learning has been achieved before through observation and it works. In my opinion it depends with what is being learnt and how necessary it is I life some of the things we observe they are more complex than what the reality is and therefore, there has to be reinforcement to make the individual serious and more dedicated to it (Light & Butterworth, 2016). This makes the theory relevant as what we observe such as games and lifestyles are easy and does not need any form of reinforcement.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Theory

Since the theory includes the three aspects which include; the fact that one can learn a behavior by watching others and then emulating their action, secondly is the use of the subconscious states that are essential in picking the idea or the information they have observed without even the individual knowing that they have acquired it and lastly is the fact that it is not mandatory or a must for the individual to change their behavior (Schinke, 2017). Since in reality we observe many things in life but we have somehow standard behaviors that are constant within us and therefore the change in behavior cannot be relevant in this case.

One of the strengths that proves that the theory is real is the experiment done by Bandura in 1961. The experiment aimed at seeing how the theory works on children. It involved an adult playing with a large doll while the children were watching and soon afterwards when handed the doll the child would play exactly as the adult did without any form or reinforcements (Bushman, 2019). This shows how effective the theory is applicable in reality. Another strength lies...