THE MEANING OF PERSONALITY
When we hear someone say that “Marge has a lot of personality,” this tells us that Marge is a colorful and interesting person. But the term personality is incorrectly used, because one’s personality includes all of one’s behavior characteristics. Used correctly, one person does not have more personality than another; one has a different personality than another. A useful definition is offered by Ginger [1965, . p. 141], who says: “Personality is the totality of behavior of an individual with a given tendency system interacting with a sequence .of situations.” The phrase, “a given tendency system,” indicates that each person has characteristic
ways of acting, and acts much the same day after day. When we remark, “Isn’t that just like Ruth,” we recognize that R has a behavior “tendency system” that is quite characteristic of her. The phrase, ‘” interacting with a sequence of situation dates that
behavior is a joint product of a person’s behavior tendencies and the behavior situations that person meets. To understand personality, we need to know how behavior tendency systems develop through the interaction of the biological organism with various kinds of social and cultural experience.
