The Impact of Media on Behavior and Personality

The Impact of Media on Behavior and Personality
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The Impact of Media on Behavior and Personality
Human behavior is a product of factors specific to a person, such as their beliefs, emotions, personality, and environmental factors. This paper explores how the environment, reinforcement, and social cognitive theory (SCT) can work together to influence human behavior. The knowledge from this exploration will then be applied to establish the impact of media on behavior.
The environment plays an instrumental role in human behavior. According to Schunk and DiBenedetto (2020), the environment influences a person's thoughts and actions, and in turn, this influences how a person behaves. In understanding human behavior and how the environment influences it, it is important to explore one major theory that explains human behavior; the SCT. According to the SCT, behaviors are learned in social interactions, where people learn by watching the behaviors of others (Hagger et al., 2020). In this case, human behavior is impacted by social influence, that is, how their social environment requires them to behave. Thus, a person's behavior can change as they try to conform to their social environment. In addition, the SCT holds that human behavior is maintained through reinforcements (Hagger et al., 2020). These reinforcements are either external in the sense that they result from the social environment or internal in the sense that they result from personal factors such as self-regulation and expectations. According to Lowry et al. (2017), during the behavior reinforcement process, learned behaviors and the practical consequences interact with environmental and personal factors, which is how behaviors are maintained. Through the reinforcement process, people drop non-beneficial behaviors and repeat the beneficial ones.
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