HOW CHOICES ARE MADE AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPED

By Segun Ogunlade

Have you ever wondered why you act the way you do? Have you ever wondered what makes you react to situations the way you do? Have you ever thought about why you make all the important decisions you’ve made in your life like the choice of school, relationship, food? Do you have a good reason for preferring hamburger to hotdogs or ice-cream to carbonated drinks? If you give temperament as your reason, you might be right but not totally so. For many times besides our temperaments, the way we live our lives and the choices we make are conditioned by the type of environment we were born into, the quality of thinking and the lifestyle of the people we spent our formative years with. This is the same way our religion was chosen for us because we are born into one particular family and not the other, and grew up in one environment and not the other. Now, from time immemorial, very few people have been found to live above the lessons of life they received in their formative years. One way or another, we reflect our background, culturally or religiously or otherwise. And when we talk about personality, there are some things that are involved in its formation than meets the eyes. The determinants of one’s personality as discussed by Olakunle Soriyan are very complex.

The only time a person remains hundred percent natural and undiluted is the second he was born. At that moment, he has no sin, has offended no one, has no particular traits and has no knowledge of what is good or bad. This stage according to Olakunle Soriyan is the innocence stage. It is immediately over a second after one’s birth. A person is welcomed to the world by the parents, close relatives and the hospital staffs. From that moment onward, the clean slate the person is carrying began to have different contents written on it according to the dictates of the people the person is surrounded with and what those people think and believe as important and hold dear. A script was written for the person and has to be followed so as to gain approval in the neighbourhood. Many of these scripts are written by the parents and those before those parents.

Because one’s innocence was hijacked at such an early stage, one becomes the victim of what one’s parents suffered and inherited the problems emanating from the quality of their thinking. A man’s mind in those formative years was conditioned in accordance to the dictates of his immediate environment. The mind is trained not to question things but to accept them the way they are. Everybody accepts everything happening to them without exploring other options because they all live by the same rule – learn to live and adapt to undesirable situations. The mind couldn’t think for itself but conform to the standard of the society. The person that is a victim of his or her environment would most likely fail where those before him or her failed. He or she would turn back where the elders in her family said there was no way when they could have pressed further.

Thus, one’s preference is based on the contents of the script one is presented with and the victim of what those before one suffered. In the script, some things are called good which are not necessarily so why some are labelled as bad because the parents failed to achieve them after spending a long time trying to. For example, one would prefer reading in an organised library to reading in an open classroom because one’s relative has said noise impedes understanding. Or one would stay aloof from extracurricular activities because it is believed to distract one from academic success. Because of this the person would refuse to join a student organisation that could help develop one’s own personality different from that of one’s parents. By this mode of direct transfer from the society to one’s heart, one’s preference is patterned after those of one’s parents and the society at large. What is good or bad, accepted or rejected, is based on what the society says about them. It is this preference that forms one’s choices and what one holds as dear and what one does not.

From this preference, prejudices are formed. Now, prejudice according to Mariam Webster dictionary is often having a negative opinions formed without sufficient knowledge. This means one grows to dislike some things without knowing why such things are disliked. Her prejudices are stereotypical and oftentimes rooted in ignorance of the actual fact. These prejudices exist in different modes and features. One could resent a particular ethnic group because one’s parents call them bad; one could dislike actresses because the society calls them promiscuous; and one could grow up to see women that are striving to self independence as rude and not African because the society is patriarchal and wants the women in the living room, the kitchen and the other room. These prejudices are carried on for a long time and oftentimes throughout one’s lifetime. They formed the core of one’s relationship with others.

It is the combination of these that culminated into one’s personality. At birth one’s innocence was hijacked by the things that victimised one’s parents. By being a victim, one’s preferences are limited to those things that exist in one’s parents and one’s environment worldview. These preferences snowballed into prejudices and these form one’s personality. Thus, an average person is not a version of himself or herself. We are simply acting the script prepared for us by our parents and those before them. At a young age, the mind is captured and the rest of one’s life is lived in accordance with the type of environment one grew up in, cherishing the same traits and disproving of others. A good child sometimes is not submissive but subdued because he has never been able to live his own life and act his own scripts. According to a study, 80 percent of a person’s personality is formed by age 6. This means the quality of life and thinking one is exposed in the formative years of one’s life goes a long way in shaping one’s life and affecting the type of decisions one made. The society and family conditioned one to act in a way and not the other, to relate with one ethnic group and not the other and to pass the test of locality and not universality. No man at birth chooses to be a criminal or a drug addict. It is the society that made him so because his innocence was hijacked early in life. The thinking was shaped and the lifestyle tailored to reflect certain values. One’s fearlessness and light was taken away and replaced with fear and darkness. No man or woman was born with fear. The society created those fears in them. And no matter how one try not to be a continuous victim of his society, one oftentimes revert back to doing those things he detests because he was wired so and he is powerless against it.

The task now is to examine our individual to decipher the amount of wrong teachings our family and the society at large has deposited in us in our formative years. We should strive to know what created the fears we have of certain things and the hopelessness we feel against certain situations. Aside temperament therefore, our lives are lived according to the ways they are prepared for us. The quality of our live will echo our background. If one spent his formative years with mediocre, he would spend his adulthood chasing after excellence and may never get it. People don’t change; they only get revealed. When the pressure is high, everyone will demonstrate the type of thinking that rule their lives away from what people usually perceive. It is high time we all sat down to dissect our lives and diagnose the quantity of bad teachings the society and our families had infused into it. One can only spew out what one takes in. If one takes in what is good, he lives a beautiful life. But if he takes in that which is bad, his quality of life would reflect same. No wonder the Preacher man in the Good Book says the heart should be guided with all diligence for out of it flows the issues of life. Our personality of today is not our true self but what the society had made of us. We are what our society is. Yet we are judged by our personality even though it is not formed by us but by the society for us. Thus, we are a product of what type of society we grow up for that was what made us who we are. It is not who we are. And until we discover who we are, we will never be our true self. We cannot free ourselves from the shackles of what the society had made us become if we are not deliberate about it. Time to act from emancipation from bad societal deposit in our lives is now. Otherwise we will live our lives in a vicious cycle of failure and disappointments.

Segun Ogunlade is a final year student of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan. His email is ogunlade02@gmail.com and his number is +2348085851773, +2348117821092