Personality, Choices

Personality specifies a stable set of individual psychological characteristics that influence thinking, motivation, and behavior in various situations. Personality has to be distinguished from individual differences due to, for example, cultural heritage or socioeconomic class. Rather than being solely determined by the psychosocial environment, personality is thought to be the result of an interaction between genetic and environmental factors that lead to an underlying behavioral disposition and thus constitutes the psychological uniqueness of a human being. A current personality concept is the Big Five, a set of five independent traits describing a person's character: (1) openness to experience, (2) conscientiousness, (3) extraversion, (4) agreeableness, and (5) neuroticism. Personality has been proposed as a factor affecting the behavior of patients seeking medical treatment, especially with regard ...