WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

The term personality has been derived from the Latin word “Persona” which was associated
with Greek theatre in ancient times. The Greek actors commonly used to wear masks on their
faces during their performances on the stage. The mask worn by the actors was called persona.
Personality was thought to be the effect and influence which the individual wearing a mask left
on the audience

DEFINITIONS OF PERSONALITY
Lawrence Kolberg- “Each individual’s characteristically recurring patterns of behaviour are
known as personality”

R. B. Cattel “Personality is that which permits a prediction of what a person will do in a given
situation”.

In the words of Munn, “Personality may be defined as the most characteristic integration of an
individual’s structure, modes of behaviour, interest, attitude, capacities, abilities, and
aptitudes.”

Woodworth and Marquis define personality as “the total quality of an individual’s behaviour
as it is revealed in his characteristic habit of thought and expression, his attitudes, interests and
his own philosophy of life.”

Gordon Allport who devoted most of his time for research on personality defines: “Personality
is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychological systems that determine
his unique adjustment to his environment.”

This definition is comprehensive and includes various aspects of personality

Dynamic Organization: According to Allport, personality involves active organization, which

is constantly evolving and changing, and which involves motivation and self-regulation. Thus,
it is dynamic, not static. Organization also brings with it the possibility of disorganization, and
the resulting abnormalities associated with personality disorders and/or mental illness.

Psychophysical Systems: The term “psychophysical” means that personality reflects both mind
and body, the total organism. The systems include habits, attitudes, sentiments, and dispositions
of various kinds. Most important, however, are the traits, which may be either latent or active.

Determine: In Allport’s view, “personality is something and does something.” Personality is

not synonymous with behaviour, it underlies it, and it comes from within the individual. The
systems mentioned above can be viewed as determining tendencies.

Unique: Naturally, each adjustment by an individual is unique in time, space, and quality.

Adjustments to His Environment: Personality, according to Allport, is a mode of survival, it

has functional and evolutionary significance. For humans, are not simply reactive, as plants
and animals are, because they can be spontaneous and creative. They can, and do, seek mastery
over the environment (both behavioural and geographic). Unfortunately, once again the
possibility exists for maladaptive behaviour that arises under abnormal conditions (such as an
abusive home environment).

NATURE OF PERSONALITY
Personality is a whole rather than a sum of parts. We cannot identify the personality of a person
on the basis of his physique or his intellectual level or his character. But the all these elements
put together are made to function in harmony which makes his personality. The conduct,
behaviour, activities, movements and everything else concerning the individual are known as
personality. It is the way of responding to the environment. The way in which an individual
adjusts with the external environment is personality. Let us discuss the following points
regarding the nature of personality.

Personality is the result of both heredity and environment:

Heredity involves all those physiological and psychological peculiarities, which a person
inherits from his parents. These peculiarities are transmitted to us through genes. It is
indisputable that heredity determines the difference of sex and it is on this basis that some
scientists contend that heredity determines personality because it is the difference of sex, which
determines the personality of men and women. Environment has a very significant effect on
man. Its effect starts from his birth and continues almost till his death. The status of the child,
youth and the old man in the family and in the society is not same and as a result of this
difference, a man’s roles, temperaments, ways of thinking, tendencies and character are
affected; all these determine the personality of men and women. In the same way, the status of
the person in places like school, occupation, social situation, etc. affects his personality.

Personality is composed of traits, which are by and large learned or acquired:

By the time we become a mature personality, the contribution of learning is so prominent that
we often misinterpret personality as the equivalent of learning. It is important to note that
learning plays a very important role in the making of one’s personality. In order to explain the
dynamics of one’s personality, it is sometimes convenient to refer to the various types of
learning, which a person is able to exhibit in his behavioural range.

Personality implies an integration of various traits:

All the elements, which are ultimately identified as parts of personality structure, get integrated
rather than assembled together. Thus, the integration of various traits results into a distinct
whole which is known as personality of an individual. Personality represents a unique
integration of traits so as to differentiate one person from another on the basis of this very
quality. The unique way in which we laugh or smile, weep or cry, talk or lecture, greet or salute
becomes the watermark of our personality.

Personality is a dynamic process:

Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual. Here, dynamic means that
personality is undergoing a constant change but is still organized. Personality development is
reciprocal relationship between the ways in which a person views his experiences and his actual
social and interpersonal experiences. Development of personality is a continuous growth,
which occurs because of the inherent tendency toward self-growth on the one hand and our
personal, environmental and social experiences on the other hand. Therefore, we can say that
personality is a dynamic process.

CHARACTERISTICS OF PERSONALITY
We have seen how personality has been variously defined by psychologists, though there are
differences in views, but even then all psychologists agree on certain common characteristics.
Our understanding of the nature of personality will be clear if we go through the characteristics
of personality. These are:

Unique:
Each individual personality is unique and specific. No two persons, not even identical twins
have exactly the same qualities and attributes.
Organization: Personality is not just one or more aspects of behaviour, but it is one’s total
integrated behaviour, woven into a whole. The greater the degree of organization, the more
healthy and normal the person is.

Consistency or stability:
Consistency or stability is one of the characteristics of personality. A person is recognizable
from situation to situation by the consistent characteristics that are reflected in his behaviour.

Dynamic:
Although the personality of an individual remains stable to a large extent, it can’t be said to
be static, It is always dynamic and continuously in the process of change and modification.
Think about your own personality (what type of person you are at the present moment and what
type you were while studying in school.)

Self-consciousness:
Personality exhibits self-consciousness and it is the proud possession of human being. Manis
described as having personality when the idea of “self‟ enters into his consciousness. A dog or
a cow has no personality of its own because neither of the two possess self-consciousness.

Psychophysical systems:
Personality is neither exclusively physical nor is exclusively mental. Similarly it is neither the
product of heredity exclusively, nor is it the product of acquired behaviour or learning
exclusively. Organization of personality entails the functioning of both “body” and “mind”.
Psychophysical systems composed of habits, attitudes, sentiments etc. are the product of
hereditary endowments and the acquired life experiences of the individual.

Social:
Personality is completely social. Personality has existence only in relation to the external
world. An individual’s relation with his environment, his feelings, attitudes, are basic to the
idea of personality. An integrated personality is one which make harmonious adjustment to
environment, particularly the social environment

HISORY OF PERSONALITY

The concept of personality has been studied for at least 2,000 years, beginning with
Hippocrates in 370 BCE .Hippocrates theorized that personality traits and human behaviours
are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids (“humours”) of the body:
choleric temperament (yellow bile from the liver), melancholic temperament (black bile from
the kidneys), sanguine temperament (red blood from the heart), and phlegmatic temperament
(white phlegm from the lungs). Centuries later, the influential Greek physician and
philosopher Galen built on Hippocrates’s theory, suggesting that both diseases and personality
differences could be explained by imbalances in the humours and that each person exhibits one
of the four temperaments. For example, the choleric person is passionate, ambitious, and bold;
the melancholic person is reserved, anxious, and unhappy; the sanguine person is joyful, eager,
and optimistic; and the phlegmatic person is calm, reliable, and thoughtful. Galen’s theory was
prevalent for over 1,000 years and continued to be popular through the middle Ages.

In 1780, Franz Gall, a German physician, proposed that the distances between bumps on the
skull reveal a person’s personality traits, character, and mental abilities According to Gall,
measuring these distances revealed the sizes of the brain areas underneath, providing
information that could be used to determine whether a person was friendly, prideful,
murderous, kind, good with languages, and so on. Initially, phrenology was very popular;
however, it was soon discredited for lack of empirical support and has long been relegated to
the status of pseudoscience

The pseudoscience of measuring the areas of a person’s skull is known as phrenology.

(a) Gall developed a chart that depicted which areas of the skull corresponded to particular
personality traits or characteristics
(b) An 1825 lithograph depicts Gall examining the skull of a young woman.

In the centuries after Galen, other researchers contributed to the development of his four
primary temperament types, most prominently Immanuel Kant (in the 18th century) and
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (in the 19th century) Kant agreed with Galen that everyone
could be sorted into one of the four temperaments and that there was no overlap between the
four categories He developed a list of traits that could be used to describe the personality of a
person from each of the four temperaments. However, Wundt suggested that a better
description of personality could be achieved using two major axes: emotional/non emotional
and changeable/unchangeable. The first axis separated strong from weak emotions (the
melancholic and choleric temperaments from the phlegmatic and sanguine). The second axis
divided the changeable temperaments (choleric and sanguine) from the unchangeable ones
(melancholic and phlegmatic) Developed from Galen’s theory of the four temperaments, Kant
proposed trait words to describe each temperament. Wundt later suggested the arrangement of
the traits on two major axes.
Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic perspective of personality was the first comprehensive
theory of personality, explaining a wide variety of both normal and abnormal behaviours.
According to Freud, unconscious drives influenced by sex and aggression, along with
childhood sexuality, are the forces that influence our personality. Freud attracted many
followers who modified his ideas to create new theories about personality. These theorists,
referred to as neo-Freudians, generally agreed with Freud that childhood experiences matter,
but they reduced the emphasis on sex and focused more on the social environment and effects
of culture on personality. The perspective of personality proposed by Freud and his followers
was the dominant theory of personality for the first half of the 20th century.

Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was a follower of Freud who developed his own interpretation of
Freudian theory. Adler proposed that the primary motivation in human personality was not sex
or aggression, but rather the striving for superiority. According to Adler, we desire to be better
than others and we accomplish this goal by creating a unique and valuable life. Adler believed
that psychological disorders begin in early childhood. He argued that children who are either
overly nurtured or overly neglected by their parents are later likely to develop an inferiority
complex—a psychological state in which people feel that they are not living up to expectations,
leading them to have low self-esteem, with a tendency to try to overcompensate for the negative
feelings. People with an inferiority complex often attempt to demonstrate their superiority to
others at all costs, even if it means humiliating, dominating, or alienating them. According to
Adler, most psychological disorders result from misguided attempts to compensate for the
inferiority complex in order meet the goal of superiority.

Carl Jung (1875–1961) was another student of Freud who developed his own theories about
personality. Jung agreed with Freud about the power of the unconscious but felt that Freud
overemphasized the importance of sexuality. Jung argued that in addition to the personal
unconscious, there was also a collective unconscious, or a collection of shared ancestral
memories. Jung believed that the collective unconscious contains a variety of archetypes, or
cross-culturally universal symbols, which explain the similarities among people in their
emotional reactions to many stimuli. Important archetypes include the mother, the goddess, the
hero, and the mandala or circle, which Jung believed symbolized a desire for wholeness or
unity. For Jung, the underlying motivation that guides successful personality is self-realization,
or learning about and developing the self to the fullest possible extent.

Karen Horney (1855–1952), was a German physician who applied Freudian theories to create
a personality theory that she thought was more balanced between men and women. Horney
believed that parts of Freudian theory, and particularly the ideas of the Oedipus complex and
penis envy, were biased against women. Horney argued that women’s sense of inferiority was
not due to their lack of a penis but rather to their dependency on men, an approach that the
culture made it difficult for them to break from. For Horney, the underlying motivation that
guides personality development is the desire for security, the ability to develop appropriate and
supportive relationships with others.