Essay On Personality Development

The behaviorist theory of personality development best explains how personality develops. This is so because it seeks to explain the practical aspect of personality as it is studied through observable behavior. Therefore the explanations behind it as propagated by its greatest thinkers like B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson are based on how an individual learns from the environment in which they are in and how this shapes their personality.
Learning and conditioning are what determine behavior according to behaviorists. The environment therefore plays a very big role in doing so. People will therefore behave in a certain way because their response tendencies will borrow a lot from what they have learnt from other people from the environment in which they are in. this explains the reason why over time, it is possible to find a person behaving in a particular way all thanks to what they have been exposed to.
Also, in most cases, the behaviors that tend to have positive consequences are reinforced because people in the immediate environment agree to them while those that solicit negative consequences decrease because they are not encouraged. By mere exposure to the environment in which some of these actions are done determines whether they will form the desired characteristics which determine personality.
It is therefore imperative to consider the behaviorist theory as the one that best explains the development of personality. This is so because for personality to develop one should not be far removed from society because it happens to be the determinant factor for human development and more so personality. For the mere fact that personality keeps developing over time, exposure to certain attributes make it possible for one to behave in a certain way.