Personality

There are three primary factors which influence personality, these are: one's response to his environment, environment, and heredity. Response to environment however, is more of an influential factor than either of the other two factors, although all of the factors do have influence and effects. I choose now to address the prime opposers of the environment and one's response to his environment.

Concerning environment it has been said that not only is it an influential factor of personality but the most influential, more so even than one's responses to environment. This however, undermines the power of free will and takes a very fatalistic outlook that your environment is the primary shaper of your personality, which is to say it is the primary shaper of the "you" in "your personality". And that is a dreary outlook. For is it not our choices that make us who we are and distinguish us as individuals? Let me explain via example. Throughout highschool I have had the priviledge to have several classes with a girl who for the sake of things we will name Allison. I have grown to admire Allison, although I have not conversed with her often I have an odd tendency to observe people. I have grown to admire her because of her choices which reflect her character and her personality.(It is interesting to note that my choice to admire her is indeed a choice and a reflection of my own personality.) Allison is a happy girl, not the kind of girl who can't stop giggling and always has a huge smile, but simply plain good mood happy. She tries hard in school, she is in honors classes and maintains acceptable grades of a student who puts forth effort. From what I have said she is seemingly an all together respectable person, and she is. She is also of Hispanic descent and had a child last year. I mention the latter to highlight the influence that our choices have on us, both good and bad. For she has surely made some choices which she regrets but I am confident she has also made many good choices. I mention the former not to discriminate against her because of her race but instead to point out the flaw in stereotyping. For if one actually believed the common stereotype then he would be falling into the belief that those who fall under the stereotype all behave in a certain manner because of their environment. This is exactly the idea which I hope to have disproved in my account of Allison. Allison is a good respectable name, a beautiful name.

Futhermore, another reason I believe that one's response to his environment is more influential to his personality than his environment itself is that Newton's third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, may be applied. At least, I feel it can in an unusual way. For every circumstance there is an equal and opposite response. Assuming that the environment is more influential than one's response to the environment is comparable to saying that the action is greater than the reaction it produces. Now I could move on having clarified that the circumstance can not be greater than the response it produces but this however, will seem contradictory to opposers of this view. They will ask about some unreasonable buffoon, whom they have the bad luck of being friends with, who completely over reacts to everything. How is it that the response may be greater than the circumstance? This seemingly blatant flaw is easily corrected though when one realizes that the magnitude of the response varies accordingly with the magnitude of the circumstance which varies based on how the responder perceives it. And so it is that the response may not be greater than the circumstance, it may only be that the circumstance was overperceived. But, it should be noted that the response may be of greater value than the circumstance. Greater value is given to the response because the response is derived from the free will of the responder through choice which, as I hoped to prove through my account of Allison, is a tremendously valuable thing. This derived value of the response is what gives it value in our lives and leads us to the logical conclusion that one's response to the environment is more influential to one's personality than the environment itself.