Question

9. Albert Bandura views the person-environment interaction as reciprocal determinism. “Behavior, internal personal factors, and environmental influences,” he said, “all operate as interlocking determinants of each other.” Discuss three ways in which individuals and the environment interact. Explain how genes and environment can interact to influence traits and personality and discuss one study supporting this interaction.

Answer 1

According to psychologist Albert Bandura, reciprocal determinism is a model composed of three factors that influence behavior: the environment, the individual, and the behavior itself. According to this theory, an individual's behavior influences and is influenced by both the social world and personal characteristics.

This model suggests that these three components are continually interacting with one another. Just as the environment exerts an influence on individual behavior, a person's actions also play a part in influencing the environment.

There are 3 types of human environment interaction: The way people depend on the environment for food, water, timber, natural gas etc. The way people adpat the environment to fulfill their own needs. The way people modify the environment positively or negatively like drilling holes, building dams.

Personality is not determined by any single gene, but rather by the actions of many genes working together. There is no “IQ gene” that determines intelligence and there is no “good marriage-partner gene” that makes a person a particularly good marriage bet. Furthermore, even working together, genes are not so powerful that they can control or create our personality. Some genes tend to increase a given characteristic and others work to decrease that same characteristic — the complex relationship among the various genes, as well as a variety of random factors, produces the final outcome. Furthermore, genetic factors always work with environmental factors to create personality. Having a given pattern of genes doesn’t necessarily mean that a particular trait will develop, because some traits might occur only in some environments. For example, a person may have a genetic variant that is known to increase his or her risk for developing emphysema from smoking. But if that person never smokes, then emphysema most likely will not develop.