Does Your Attitude Affect Your Personality?

 

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What Is Attitude?

In modern psychology, an attitude refers to a set of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors toward a particular object, person, thing, or event. Attitudes are often the result of experience or upbringing, and they can have a powerful influence over behavior. While attitudes are enduring, they can also change.

Psychologists define it as a learned tendency to evaluate things in a certain way. This can include evaluations of people, issues, objects, or events. Such evaluations are often positive or negative, but they can also be uncertain at times.

For example, you might have mixed feelings about a particular person or issue. Researchers also suggest that there are several different components that makeup attitudes. The components of attitudes are sometimes referred to as CAB or the ABC's of attitude.

What Is Personality?

Personality encompasses a person’s relatively stable feelings, thoughts, and behavioral patterns. Each of us has a unique personality that differentiates us from other people, and understanding someone’s personality gives us clues about how that person is likely to act and feel in a variety of situations. To manage effectively, it is helpful to understand the personalities of different employees. Having this knowledge is also useful for placing people in jobs and organizations.

The Five Factors of Personality include-

Openness: This includes being curious versus cautious and conservative. It also includes curiosity about and appreciation for adventure.

Conscientiousness: This includes being organized and efficient versus easygoing and careless. Conscientious people would demonstrate self-discipline and plan out things, rather than being spontaneous.

Extroversion: This area focuses on how outgoing or reserved and withdrawn someone is, as well whether she or he is shy. It also includes people displaying positive emotions, energy, etc.

Agreeableness: This trait is about how compassionate and friendly someone is, as well as how competitive and outspoken the person may be. It also includes how well people cooperate with others.

Neuroticism: Sensitivity, confidence, and security play important roles in the neuroticism trait, which includes how people experience such things as depression, anger, unpleasant situations, etc.

Now, coming to the main question-

Does our Attitude affects our Personality or not?

Looking at the definitions of both these terms, it can be pointed out that-

Our personality is defined as a set of traits that can explain or predict a person’s behavior in a variety of situations. In other words, personality is a set of characteristics that reflect the way we think and act in a given situation. Because of this, our personality has a lot to do with how we relate to one another at work. How we think, what we feel, and our normal behavior characterizes what our colleagues come to expect of us both in behavior and the expectation of their interactions with us.

For example, let’s suppose at work you are known for being on time but suddenly start showing up late daily. This directly conflicts with your personality—that is, the fact that you are conscientious. As a result, coworkers might start to believe something is wrong. On the other hand, if you did not have this characteristic, it might not be as surprising or noteworthy. Likewise, if your normally even-tempered supervisor yells at you for something minor, you may believe there is something more to his or her anger since this isn’t a normal personality trait and also may have a more difficult time handling the situation since you didn’t expect it. When we come to expect someone to act a certain way, we learn to interact with them based on their personality. This goes both ways, and people learn to interact with us based on our personality. When we behave different than our normal personality traits, people may take time to adjust to the situation.

Although there is a debate between whether or not our personalities are inherent when we are born (nature) versus the way we grew up (nurture), most researchers agree that personality is usually a result of both nature and our environmental/education experiences. For example, you have probably heard someone say, “She acts just like her mother.” She likely behaves that way because she was born with some of her mother’s traits, as well as because she learned some of the behaviors her mother passed to her while growing up.

Thus, as a result, it can be concluded that our attitudes do have an effect on our personality but it is not the sole factor in determining the personality of a person.

Written by - Yashwant Singh Tyagi

Edited by - Vaibhav Sharma