Can Environments Modify and Enhance the Development of Personality and Behavior?

Abstract

The general stability of individual personality and behavior patterns may result not only from inherited factors and previous experience, but also from the tendency for most of us to live in social environments that remain relatively similar over time. Efforts to induce change require, therefore, that new kinds of environments be provided that are designed to elicit desired changes rather than reproducing familiar experiences. Residential group care has the potential to provide such an influence, but it frequently tends instead (often under pressure from the residents toward familiarity and stability) to reproduce key features of their previous environments. The effective Modifying Environment uses the potential of planned, unfamiliar experiences to produce change, rather than succumbing to the numbing effect of familiar ones that reinforce established pattems that may be adaptive in one's immediate situation but deleterious in a broader sense.Sea