Personality and Politics: Part One
Psychologically speaking, each one of us reacts to life’s challenges in different ways. That’s not exactly news to anyone, but sometimes understanding how character traits contribute to the gestalt of behavior, thoughts and emotions, we can learn why we react to a multitude of life’s experiences.
The science of Psychology has many different theories of personality which have emerged over the past 150 years. The theories a person may subscribe to, in part, is a function of his or her own “personality”, so it has always been interesting to me how individual and political perspectives evolve. I say evolve, because that is what usually happens: a particular orientation may make perfect sense to us in our youth but in middle age, may seem overly simplistic. I don’t intend to bore my readers with the dry details of theories (it was bad enough in graduate school) but I thought it might be fun to think about a few of the major perspectives and ask ourselves “Does this sound like me (or the political climate) and if so, can I use this information to learn something about myself (and politics)?”
Considering how there has been more media coverage about “sharing the wealth”, I thought a brief coverage of Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory might be a good place to start. Dr. Bandura was born in 1925, in a farming community in Alberta, Canada. He believed that behavior is caused by a complex relationship between inner mental processes and environmental influences (Bandura, 1971). For example, we do not need to resort to actual trial and error behaviors to solve problems, but we can use symbolic representations of behavior to guide our decisions. He felt that even though we learn from the positive or negative results of previous behaviors, we acquire, maintain and alter our actions from other ways as well. How we anticipate an outcome is what regulates our behavior as well as what we learn watching others. Most people don’t wait to have an accident to buy vehicle insurance or to learn how to drive.
Sounds simple enough, right? Not so fast…. In order to learn from modeling, you need the observer and the “model”. However, there are many environmental factors which affect this process: age, gender, personality characteristics of the observer, attitude and behaviors of the “model”, and consequences of behaviors. In one experiment, one group of children watched a model reward himself with candies for excellent performance, and another group watched a model reward himself with candies for poor performance. Results of observing the children later indicated that those who watched the “excellent performance” model tended to reward themselves sparingly with candies, while the children who watched the “poor performance” model rewarded themselves quite often, even when their own performance was poor.
Aggression, violence, pornography and other harmful behaviors and attitudes in the media can be understood by Social Learning Theory. Bandura acknowledged that simply viewing violence in the media does not cause violence; however, under the right circumstances, exposure can facilitate aggression. We know when we watch something which is shocking to our sensibilities, we get a release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter, implicated in addictive behaviors. When brain chemistry is altered, so is our behavior.
So if watching someone engage in a destructive or negative behavior and getting some reward for it increases the chances that we would do the same on an individual basis, what happens on a large scale basis? Does watching public figures (politicians, celebrities, athletes) reward themselves for unacceptable attitudes and behaviors contribute to a decline in the moral aesthetic of our country? You decide: does this sound like you? Does this sound like America?
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About Dr. Virginia
As a licensed Psychologist practicing Cognitive therapy, I work with my clients to help them identify the personal issues that are preventing them from achieving a more satisfying and well-adjusted life.
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