Personality is a collection of traits that define who you are, while the behavior is the actions or behaviors someone exhibits. A person will be judged by how they behave and what traits constitute their personality.
Personality Vs. Behavior
How do we differentiate between a person’s actions, on the one hand, and their personality traits like emotions or cognitions? The difference is that behavior refers to what a person does in general. Whereas personality relates to innate characteristics such as mood or cognition.
Behavior is how a person expresses themselves. It can be something as simple or complex as the way they act in general with other people and their surroundings, or it could just be about one specific situation that pops up from time to time.
Personality refers to the overall characteristics and qualities of a person, which find expression through how they feel, think, or act.
Personality is a way of describing what someone is like. It stands for everything from inner qualities to the outside behaviors that are exhibited by an individual. In other words, it represents your true self and how you behave in the world around you.
Comparison Table Between Personality and Behavior
| Parameter of Comparison | The Behavior | The Personality |
| Definition | A person’s behavior is how they act and react to others, the surroundings in general, and their own thoughts. | The personality is a combination of cognitive and emotional patterns that have evolved over time. It’s not just genetics or the environment. |
| Related to | The behavior may involve animals or humans, insects; it might be related to elements of microorganisms, or even the entire planet. | Personality is a trait that humans only possess. |
| Expressed through | It’s what a person does that expresses his or her actions. | It is expressed through one’s thinking, and emotions. |
| Prone to Change | Changes depend entirely on the situation at hand. | It’s inherent while remaining stable. |
| Nature of Change | It tends to take place for a temporary period of time. | It is more likely to become permanent. |
What is Behavior?
Behavior is a person’s actions and reactions in certain situations, as well as how he or she reacts to the situation at hand. This can be influenced by one’s cognition, beliefs, and values; but ultimately it changes depending on the situation.
For example, a person may act professionally in any formal gathering. While he or she may act casual in a gathering with his or her family and friends.
A person can be judged by how they behave, but not totally. Without any context or background information to go on, what a person does is simply their behavior and the way in which they choose to express themselves.
For example, an extrovert may go from being very talkative to staying quiet at certain times.
Behavior alone doesn’t tell the whole story when it comes to evaluating someone. How a person thinks and feels, as well as their capabilities need to be taken into consideration in order for an accurate evaluation of the individual’s personality. In short, assessing your overall personality is one of the best ways to evaluate a person accurately. In addition, since the word “action” is used in the context of this phrase, it can also be used to describe anything with a mannerism like humans and animals.
Psychology as a discipline has attempted to understand human behavior that includes emotions, thoughts, and feelings. It is not in the hope of improving emotional or mental disorders but rather trying to create a more positive state for people by changing some of their behaviors.
Behavioral Psychology approaches are broadly divided into some major subdivisions, including:
- Behavior Therapy: Behavior Therapy is a clinical form of psychotherapy that applies methods from what’s known as the Theory Of Behaviorism, which recognizes and changes behaviors that are meant to be unhealthy or destructive.
- Cognitive therapy: Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that how we perceive certain things impacts our feelings. It encourages looking at current experiences, rather than focusing on past ones and focusing on problem-solving in order to overcome issues.
- Cognitive-Behavior Therapy: it is a therapy that aims to change perceptions of the self and the world. It tries to help people break destructive patterns in order for them to live healthier lives.
- Behavioral therapy: It is the practice of teaching people skills to improve their life or increase skill acquisition or performance. This kind of treatment aims to teach social skills, academic and adaptive learning skills. It may also be called “Applied Behavior Analysis”.
Behavioral psychology is a set of concepts that attempts to study behavior. Major tools used by psychologists include Classical and Operant Conditioning, Behavioral Modelling, and Cognitive Restructuring. Some of the most famous behavioral psychologists are B.F Skinner, Walter Mischel, Albert Bandura.
What is Personality?
It refers to a person’s innate, evolving qualities that are created by an amalgamation of genetic and environmental factors. In terms of a person’s actuality, rather than their actions, psychological profiling takes into account his or her thoughts and emotions. The concept is described in part by the person’s cognitions (how he or she thinks), emotional patterns (the way they feel), and behavior.
These characteristics develop at a young age and are therefore consistent in a person.
Personality is an inherent, stable thing that cannot change. It helps in identifying people from one another and also enables the observer to tell a person’s behavioral pattern in particular situations.
Personality psychology is the study of personality and its influence on human behavior. It can be approached from different angles or by developing theories based on varying concepts. Some of these approaches are biological, cognitive, learning and trait-based, psychodynamic, and humanistic perspectives.
There are 5 components that make up a person’s personality:
- Conscientiousness: Conscientiousness is a personality trait that assesses how organized, careful, and self-disciplined someone is. It can also be described as the degree of organization you exhibit in your life.
- Agreeableness: Agreeableness is an assessment of how well you interact with other people and within a team.
- Neuroticism: Neuroticism is a personality trait that assesses the way someone manages stress.
- Openness to experience: It is the degree of imagination, creativity, and unconventionality an individual possesses.
- Extraversion: The individual’s degree of extroversion can be assessed by the extent to which they are outgoing and sociable.
The Big Five are collectively called CANOE.
These are some of the major personality theorists, including Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, and Hans Eysenck.
Difference Between Behavior and Personality
Behavior is the actions that the person you are evaluating does, while personality is a description of what aspects describe how the person acts.
In comparison, Personality is the evaluation of a person’s thinking and emotion while Behavior includes observing their actions.
Personality is a characteristic of humans, while Behavior describes anything whether it’s living or non-living. Personality can only be used to describe human beings.
Personality is the innate and evolved characteristics of an individual, which largely determine his behavior. Personality is simply a combination of inherent qualities like your nature and evolved ones like your experiences. It’s these feelings that have led to behavioral changes in you over time – but it’s still going strong!
Personality is a complex and multilayered characteristic of an individual which may be assessed by how that person behaves. However, behavior cannot be judged in terms of personality.
Conclusion
In general, the terms Personality and Behavior are often used interchangeably. A person is primarily judged by his or her actions or mannerisms.
Personality is much more than something someone does. It also includes feelings and cognitions, too. Behaviors are only one of the traits of personality, but we should not forget about them either!