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Absolutely! Your environment can have a large influence on who you are as a person. The reverse is also true but I'll get to that later.

There are two theories related to the environment-personality relationship. The first is based on cognitive dissonance (the inability to hold two contradictory ideas or behaviours as a part of one's attitude. The other is based on morphogenetics (our ability to adapt to our environment).

According to extensive research in social psychology, cognitive dissonance is the motivational drive to reduce inner conflicts by changing or justifying one's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours to avoid anxiety, guilt, shame, stress, frustration or embarrassment because of a dissonance. Hence, if we have been conditioned by our environment to think All women must wear Orange and all men must wear Green (for the sake of argument, I chose a silly suggestion) then we are left with two choices: either justify your desire to wear Orange or Green or change your clothes from Blue to the appropriate colour. Living as a person who only wears Blue in amidst of an Orange and Green environment would make one too uncomfortable in the long run.

Morphogenesis is the biological process that causes a person (or any living being for that matter) to develop its physical form. For example, if our environment is always cold, we naturally (throughout evolution) create layers of fat to protect us from the cold. If our environment is polluted with chemicals it can have a direct effect on our DNA and thus change the way our cells reproduce and take shape (ultimately changing our physical being). Applying this to social psychology, it is said that social influences can also change the way we develop. If the people in our surroundings (especially close ones like family, friendship groups, school, etc) are emotionally cold or withdrawn, then we naturally learn to be cold and withdrawn ourselves. Becoming emotionally withdrawn can have many physical effects on our health, bodily functions, mental functions, and interpersonal relationships (Albert Garoli). The influences from our environment can occur through various means, including conditioning (Skinner and Pavlov), memetics (Dawkins and Blackmore), role modelling (Merton), identification (Freud) and behavioural modelling (Bandura).

So now that I've established that the environment we live in can have an influence on who you are as a person, I'll go one step further and explain what you can do to reverse negative influences. In the book The Evolutionary Glitch (by Albert Garoli), one learns that there are two choices one can take if there's something about the environment they don't like: you can either change yourself or change your environment. Changing yourself could be positive, but sometimes not. To know the difference would require inner wisdom and an explanation better suited for another article. Changing your environment, however, could mean physically moving yourself or trying to make a positive change to your surroundings. If you like to wear Blue and be emotionally sensitive, then why not move to a place where your attitudes, beliefs and behaviours are accepted? If you prefer to stay where you are but people are all wearing only Orange and Green or are all emotionally closed, why not try to teach them to become more open-minded and empathetic?

Learn more about this author, Catarina Newman.
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