Societal factors and their impacts

Social Factors

Social influences on personality: Social modeling and technology

Albert Bandura's reformed behaviorist approach to personality is uniquely beneficial to understanding the potentially seismic impact the Internet and technology will have in affecting the development of human personality in the future. Bandura saw personality as arising from an interaction between the person's internal psychological makeup (including but not limited to genetic influences), the environment, and the behaviors these factors produced (Boeree 2006). Bandura's most famous studies involved children replicating violent actions towards dolls, based upon their observations of adults behaving violently towards the dolls (Boeree 2006).

Attention to a new form of behavior, retaining the behavior in one's memory, reproducing the behavior, and feeling motivated, externally or internally to replicate the behavior, results in the absorption of behavior, according to Bandura. Even in the absence of direct rewards, individuals model others because they think that is what they are 'supposed' to do and feel vicarious satisfaction in the repetition of their behavior. Bandura's studies were considered revelatory because he showed how children replicate violent actions without direct adult or peer encouragement or rewards. Further research has suggested that on a neurological level, violent behavior is simulative to the reward center of the brain. Viewing televised violence can lead to increases in aggressive behavior, decreased sensitivity to violence, and fearfulness even in the absence of explicit praise (Murray 2001, p.1).

Although human society has always contained violence, television and other modern media such as the Internet, cause individuals to be exposed to much more explicit and consequence-free violence in a short period of time. Brain-mapping of children watching violent and nonviolent television programming found that while all forms of television viewing "activated regions implicated in aspects of visual and auditory processing...viewing televised violence appears to activate brain areas involved in arousal/attention, detection of threat, episodic memory encoding and retrieval, and motor programming" (Brown 2001, p.2). Viewing violence through the intensely stimulating medium of television in other words, may make a uniquely strong impression and may be especially stimulating and rewarding to the brain, thus heightening the 'attentive' and 'motivational' stages of the Bandura model. The more an individual's attention is drawn to an event, and the greater sense of an internal 'reward' of satisfaction, the greater the likelihood of social modeling.

This may explain why the Internet also has been shown an addictive capacity to focus viewer's attention for extended period of time even to the point of ignoring the user's other needs (Block 2008, p.308). Contrary to expectations an 'eye-tracking' research study found online readers read 77% of available content while broadsheet newspaper readers read an average of 62%, and tabloid readers about 57% (Goldsmith 2007). Online readers were less methodical in their approach to text, but although their eye jumped around more than their print counterparts, their less 'linear' approach to absorbing content heightened awareness and retention (Goldsmith 2007). This suggests that what we absorb online may make a viscerally strong impression, for good or for ill. Even students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder who have trouble with routine tasks of daily life show focused attention when confronted with many video games and computer applications, because, researchers believe, that such repetitive applications stimulate the pleasure-seeking areas of the brain (Brown 2007).