The College Student and Various Theories of Personality
As a college student trying to earn a Bachelor’s degree, many issues and complications arise during the years and the various courses that one must take to successfully meet all the requirements for the degree. Despite the various subjects that a college student must take, and the variety of requirements that each one necessitates for a successful completion, as well as mediating the expectations of one’s personal and professional responsibilities, there is a behavior of the student that determines his or her successful outcome in their educational pursuit. Using the various concepts from cognitive self-regulation perspective, social-cognitive learning, classical, operant, humanistic, and personal construct theories we seek to find which is best for this analysis and why.
According to Carver and Scheier (2008) the cognitive self-regulation perspective is based on the schema “or mental organizations of information” that forms our mental experience, or our personal interpretation of the world (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 373). Schemas “develop over experience” and evolve by recognizing and emulating the “prototypes” of an actual or idealized representative of a category to which we desire membership (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 396). According to Carver and Scheier (2008) “problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits” whether they result from difficulty in “encoding” or absorbing information from our social environments, “ineffective allocation of attention” to information that would increase our potentials, and “negative self-schemas” or beliefs that we accrue about ourselves which may hinder and limit our functioning properly in our social environments (p. 396). The college student may have followed the prototypical behavior of college graduates in the hopes of finding the same professional and personal advantage that a degree from a school of higher learning confers. The college student succeeds or fails by how well they utilize skills of absorbing and making use of the information presented within their courses, how well they focus their attention to this information while ignoring or limiting their attention to useless information, and how well they address negative core beliefs which may limit how successful they are in the attainment of a college education.
The social-cognitive learning perspective is based on the idea that “thought processes” play an important part in behavior, and that “people often learn from one another”, or adopt other people’s successful behavior by observation (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 315). “Social reinforcers such as acceptance and approval” can motivate the person to become either an “internal” who recognizes the importance of reinforcers on their behavior, or an “external” who believes “their outcomes to be unrelated to their actions” (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 316). The college student pursuing a higher education in this case observes successful people, adopts the behavior which they see successful people be rewarded for, and acknowledge the power of social reinforcement in their successful attainment of a college diploma.
The classical conditioning perspective, Myers (2002) states, “associates neutral stimuli with important stimuli that produce responses which are often automatic” (p. 237). In the classical perspective a student observes and follows other students into the expectation of society that a college education is the next logical step after graduating from high school, that going to a university is just a matter of doing a thing that the student believes will bring favorable praise from one’s social environment. Therefore, in regards to classical conditioning, a college education is just an automated task that one pursues as social ritual and social expectation.
In the operant conditioning perspective a person “associates behaviors with their consequences” or “operates on the environment” in response to “rewarding or punishing stimuli” (Myers, 2002, p. 237). In the operant perspective a student expects that his college education is a stepping stone toward a more “satisfying state of affairs” in one’s later career goals and personal life by attaining a degree for which society will reward you in various forms (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 271).
The humanistic perspective emphasizes that “the potential for positive, healthy growth expresses itself in everyone if there are no strong opposing influences” (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 322). Carver and Scheier (2008) go on to call this growth "actualization”, or a “tendency to develop capabilities in ways that maintain or enhance the organism” (p. 322). For the college student who is self-actualizing, one recognizes that a college education is one of the few opportunities that life offers towards becoming the most “fully functioning person” that one can become, and broaden one’s ability to “experiencing the world” (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 322).
The personal construct perspective involves predicting and anticipating future events and then reacting to these events “through the lens of” a personal construction of one’s interpretation of reality rather than actual reality itself (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 351). In the personal construct perspective a college student pursuing a higher education, predicts and anticipates how one’s future life will be enhanced by the attainment of a degree, and assumes that one’s reality will be enhanced and improved after earning a diploma.
Out of all these theories of personality that are available to understanding the college student, the cognitive self-regulation perspective seems the best for our analysis. We are what our minds make of our environments, or how our particular brain organizes and interprets information from the world. The organization of information within our minds is greatly assisted by an education in the proper functioning of various subjects, and in a learned observation of other people. It is the information that a person chooses to pay attention to, or ignores, how well a person utilizes this information in their personal spheres, and how well a person develops their belief of self, or self-schema, to function in the world that helps us best to understand why or why not a college student develops into their own prototype of personal success.
References
Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed. Boston, MA:
Pearson.
Myers, David G. (2002). Exploring Psychology, 5th ed. New York, NY: Worth
Publishers.
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