Biological and Humanistic Approaches to Personality

Biological and Humanistic Approaches to Personality

Andreea Shelley

PSY/250

May 5th, 2014

Professor Christine Hander

Humanistic personality is an arrangement of comparable dispositions, traits, or characteristics. It offers consistency to an individual’s behaviors. Biological and humanistic approaches can be very useful when measuring the individual’s personality. The humanistic approach is more liberated while the biological approach is more deterministic. However, the biological approach has been frowned upon because it has very negative and pessimistic views toward human personality. This instance makes the approaches very different from each other, but they both can be very significant when assessing the personality of a person.

The main ideas and concepts of biological and humanistic approaches vary greatly from each other. The theory of the humanistic approach begins by looking at the present dynamic of a person and refrains from focusing on the past or what can potentially happen in the future. The humanistic theory then proceeds to declaring that individuals must take complete responsibility over themselves regardless of the current state of their personality. Within the humanistic theory every person inhabits and intrinsic value about themselves. The accomplishment of personal development and positivity is the sole purpose of one’s life. Only by shear knowledge and self improvement can we truly be happy. These are all significant parts of the humanistic theory. Biological theory focuses heavily on the thought rather than the feelings of self-worth. Biological philosophers strongly believe that genetics will always determine the composition of a individual’s personality. The biological theory even proclaims that despite having a big part in personality, the behavior that someone displays determines whether that person will see...