Human Behavior and Nature

ld be defined as a set of characteristicspossessed by a person that uniquely differentiate him/her through their motivations, cognition and behaviour in certain situations.Personality arises from within the idvidual and almost stay consistent through out their lifetime.Every day we go through 100s of people around us and assessing their personalities .The pattern of our personality reflects a particular constellation of traits and characteristics that describe a person through different situations: shy, anger, happiness, hostile, brave.How many different traits or characteristics are out there?10, 100’s?This is probably the core question of all personality psychologists.

The reason what people do , how they behave in certain situations is parlty a function of their personality traits.Personality is useful in describing, explaining and also predicting future behaviour of an individual.Personality could be analysed in three levels:

a)Like all others(the human natue level)

b)Like some others(level of individual and goup differences)

c)like no others(the individual uniqueness level)

The first level describes human nature in general.That is the traits that a typical species possesses.for example every human has language skills, the desire to socialise and live with others.All these are part of the human nature.and thus typical to every other person.The second level refers to the individual or group differences.For example some people like parties , socialization where as on the other hand some like to spend quiet evenings reading or cooking.Some people try and spend their lives without anxiety or stress where as some people are always worried about what is going to happen next and wether or not they did the things right and r thus in self-doubt always.The third level shows uniquenss in an individuals personality.No two people in the world( even twins) carry identical personalities.Each of these three levels contribute to the valuable knowledge to the path of understanding the nature of personality.

The Five Factor Theory by Mc.Rae and Costa has five broad factors or dimensions of personalitydiscovered through research.The five factors are openness, concientoiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.Each factor consists of clusters of more specific traits that correlate together.These traits can be summarized as:

a)Openness-having the appreciation for art,emotion,adventure.Being curious and having a variety of experience.Those who score high on openness tend to remember their dreams and have more problem solving dreams.Openess is also related to experimentation of new products.services like foods and actvites.People who