I want to go back to personality for a minute because we learned something that I found to be particularly interesting.
The social-cognitive perspective of personality takes into consideration internal/cognitive factors, behavioral factors, and environmental factors when exploring personality. One aspect of this perspective is the idea of reciprocal determinism- that a person's behavior is determined by personal factors as well as social and environmental factors. A person's behavior is influenced by the individual as well as the environment and social stimuli he/she encounters. In other words, what a person offers up is what a person gets in return.
I found this concept to be incredibly relatable to my life. One example- when I was on the Miami basketball tournament I noticed that a girl I go to camp with was also there with her team. We aren't particularly close, so it wasn't like I was that excited to see her. We both knew each other was there, but for some reason we never said hi until I ended up going up to her on the last night of the tournament. Now, why is this? Perhaps because I chose not to say hi, she chose not to say hi. It's like she was thinking "Well why won't Lily say hi to me?" and I was thinking, "Why won't Naomi say hi to me?" Perhaps we each expected the other to make the first move, which obviously means neither of us would make the first move. This kind of situation happens to me all the time. Especially in social situations. If I walk into a party and fail to greet someone in the first couple minutes, I feel as though I can't say hi to them after that, and perhaps they interpret my failure to acknowledge them as hostility and therefore refrain from saying hello to me. This also gets into optimism vs. pessimism cycles.
What's even more fascinating is that this could be expanded into even bigger terms. If a person really gets back what they put out, an ugly, badly behaved child may be treated differently throughout their childhood and have a generally negative outlook on life. It's all about the interaction between the person and the environment. Reciprocal determinism is essentially a never ending cycle.
This happens to me too! Especially when it's someone's birthday or someone got a new haircut and you don't realize when you first see them, but by the time you do realize, everyone else has already wished that person a happy birthday or complimented their new hair, so how can you just go up to them randomly and say, "Oh, by the way, happy birthday!"? So they would think you don't like them, you can't figure out how to talk, so you think they are mad at you, and then everything just goes downhill from there.
ReplyDeleteI do think that reciprocal determinism is an important things that everyone should keep in mind. It is so true that when you see someone you might know but don't know if they remember you, you debate forever weather to go say hi. But its more than that. We should all keep in mind that the way you treat others is going to then me the way they treat you. Thats not just a nice concept but a psychological. If you act in a certain way to people they will respond in that way due to reciprocal determinism.
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