Personality Definition
Personality is an individual’s typical way of feeling, thinking, and acting. Given that personality is typical, it is fairly stable over time. Social behavior refers to a person’s feelings, thoughts, or actions as he or she relates to other people. These two definitions have a very close relationship. Knowing something about an individual’s personality should allow psychologists to predict his or her social behavior.
Similarly, knowing about a person’s social behavior should give clues to aspects of his or her personality. In other words, an individual’s personality and social behavior influence each other, and knowledge of one allows the inference of information about the other. Read more about Personality.
Personality Research Topics:
Implications
It turns out that the relationship between personality and behavior is very similar in strength to the relationship between the situation and behavior. The relationship between personality and behavior (or between the situation and behavior) allows researchers to predict a person’s behavior correctly about 70% of the time. Therefore, personality and situations are both important for predicting behavior.
It is more appropriate to use personality to predict how an individual will usually act in most situations, rather than how individuals will act in specific situations. This is because the situation itself often varies and will influence how the individual acts. Sometimes behavior can be predicted mostly from personality. Personality is likely to influence behavior more in situations when the person is exhibiting dominant personality characteristics, when that person does not care about fitting his or her behavior to the situational requirements, or when the situation is weak (no set social rules). On the other hand, the situation will play a bigger role in behavior if the situation is strong (clear social requirements) or if the person cares about keeping his or her behavior consistent with the situational requirements.
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