Personality Development Answers

Heredity is the transmission of genetic characteristics from parents to their children. Examples include blood type, natural eye color, and inherited aspects of hair texture and height potential.

Personality is a person’s relatively consistent pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It develops through the interaction of inherited characteristics and individual temperament with social experiences. Family, peers, schools, and other agents of socialization teach people norms, values, and ways of behaving. Culture and life experiences also shape personality over time, while individuals actively respond to and make choices within their environments.

Feral children act as they do because they have had little or no contact with other people during the years when children normally learn language and social behavior. Without socialization, they do not acquire many of the usual human norms, communication skills, and habits, so their behavior is shaped largely by isolation and basic survival needs.

Cultural environment shapes personality by teaching people the values, norms, beliefs, and roles of their society. Through family, peers, school, media, and other socializing influences, individuals learn ways of communicating and behaving and develop expectations about themselves and others. Cultural experiences therefore influence attitudes, habits, and identity.

“Nature” refers to biological influences, including inherited traits and genetic predispositions. “Nurture” refers to environmental influences, such as family, culture, education, relationships, and life experiences. They are not mutually exclusive: a person’s development and personality are shaped by the interaction between biology and environment.