All people have some sort of personality about them. Some people have personalities that we seem to get along with while other people have personalities that we try to stay away from. Still, many people never sit back and think about how someone’s personality originally came to be in the first place. According to Cervone & Pervin (2019), there are several different factors that can contribute to the development of personality. Some of these factors include genetics, culture, social class, family, and peers. There are several psychologists that believe that peer interactions hold a stronger influence in the development of personality than even a person’s own family unit (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). We spend a great amount of time with our family members, but most people spend over eighty percent of their day outside of the home according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019). It is no wonder why our peer interactions could be considered very influential in personality development. Other influences such as family and social class do influence personality development, but not at the rate that peer interactions do. Many studies have been done that compare siblings of the same household that were raised together yet have totally different personalities. This shows that the family does have an impact in ways such as the behavior of the parents toward the children growing up, but ultimately, children raised in the same household tend to develop vastly different personalities as they mature (Cervone & Pervin, 2019).
In a study by Deckers et al. (2015), evidence shows that children with personality qualities such as being patient, more altruistic, less risk seeking, and higher IQ scores tend to come from families in higher socioeconomic statuses. There are many subqualities that would fall under socioeconomic status which would include parental behaviors and treatment of children within the home, but ultimately it tends to show that the higher the socioeconomic status the family holds, the more positive qualities their children seem to develop within their personalities. All influences affect the personality development of people, some more than others, although our experiences also change the way we view the world and how we handle our emotional feelings while dealing with the world around us.
References:
Cervone, D., & Pervin, L. A. (2019). Personality: Theory and Research (14th ed.). Wiley.
Deckers, T., Falk, A., Kosse, F., & Schildberg-Hörisch, H. (2015, April). How Does Socio-Economic Status Shape a Child’s Personality? http://ftp.iza.org/dp8977.pdf.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2019). American time use survey summary. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
