Personality Development - Essay Example

Personality Development Raymond Cattell’s syntality is defined as the consistent and predictable behaviors in a social group. He theorized that characteristics of individuals became characteristics of the group, when said individuals were in the group setting. Most personality traits seem to vary across cultures; we see in our world a lot of differences in people and how they act depending on where they happen to live. For example, we have seen many times in the news that other cultures are more dominance minded, more aggressive, more compulsive than we may be, and that may be because of their way of life.

If you were always living in a war zone, afraid for your life and that of your family, you may become that same way. Possibly, it is the personality of the group that causes the trouble and unrest in the first place, but the fallout from that begins the cycle, the people act, the disruption occurs because of it; the people react, and so on. We have also seen cultures that seem to be very sensitive, suspicious, quiet, and insecure, quite possibly because of the way they see their world, they don’t think it will ever change so they quietly go about their business, keeping their heads down so as to not spark any controversy.

When working with different people with differing backgrounds and personalities, we must first realize what they have experienced in their lives, where did they come from? What part did they play, if any, in what is going on where they lived? We then must realize that just because someone has a personality that we may find offensive or rude, it may not be directed at us specifically, they are just that way and that is not wrong, only different. Learning to accept people and their differences may go a long way in how we treat these people, should we encounter them as clients.

Cultural differences are only one way in which people are different from each other, we must also be cognizant of a whole host of other factors that go into making someone who they are. The Big Five personality traits of McCrae and Costa are: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness and Conscientiousness. Each of these traits has several terms or facets applied to them so through interview or self evaluation, a person can agree or disagree with each of them, and the collective scores can then be used to determine personality type.

Cattell’s theory, on the other hand is made up of sixteen factors which include a ‘versus’ aspect, not unlike the theory of Erikson. Unlike Erikson, however, Cattell does not impose age restraints and a person does not have to go through the factors in any order. McCrae and Costa’s personality traits are similar to Cattell’s in that we see a lot of the same qualities or facets in both. For example, both theories deal with being imaginative; it is a part of the openness in the Big Five, and part of the abstractedness (imaginative vs.

practical) of Cattell. Another example is being insecure, found in neuroticism in the Big Five, and apprehension in Cattell’s theory. While there are some similarities in the two, there are also differences. Cattell uses sixteen factors, which seem to pigeon hole a person, for example, you are on one side of the ‘versus’ or the other. With the Big Five a personality can either score high or low on each of the five, a personality is more than just one thing versus another; it is a mixture of ideas, beliefs and factors that go into making us who we are.

I like the idea of the Big Five over the theory of Cattell because it can be administered as a self-rating test; you can choose what you most strongly agree with out of the many facets attached to each of the five, and you are not stuck with a ‘am I more this or that?’ like you would be with dealing with the theory of Cattell. You can also have positive and negative attributes to each of the five; it isn’t an all or nothing approach. I believe that personality is something that goes beyond just sticking someone into a specific hole and leaving it there, I believe we can be all different things rolled into one being, and the Big Five theory allows for that.