Self-Identification of Personality in Social Environment. Research Bulletin 80.

This paper presents a theoretical study conducted as part of a larger research project concerning personality as an educational phenomenon. In contrast to most approaches, which view personality from the outside, this approach employs systems analysis to examine how individuals identify their personalities in varying subenvironments of a social environment. According to this approach, an individual is defined with structure, function, and dynamism; personality is assumed given. Self-identification is considered to be a binary decision process with acceptance-rejection behavior according to one's own personality. The social environment is differentiated into dyad, small group, collective, organization, and aggregate subgroups. It is assumed that there is variability of relations between the subenvironments and the identification of personality. A hypothesis for dynamism is constructed: in the dyad, the smallest element of social environment that can function as social environment, the preferential behavior is perceived according to one's personality; in the small group, preferences become ambivalent; in the collective, there is contagion of behavior; in the organization, there is strong binary-decision making; and in the aggregate, no specific conditions of behavior are presumed. The paper establishes the theoretical basis, examines the subject matter in detail, and makes a proposal for quantification and measurement operations for an empirical inquiry. It concludes with some discussion about the connection of the study and education for the development of social skills. The structure measure, function and dynamism measures, and a background information measure in Finnish are appended. (Author/NB)