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Good Will Hunting: Environmental And Biological Factors In Personality Development

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ENVIRONMENTAL/BIOLOGICAL FACTORS IN PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT Abstract This paper is an evaluation of the character Will Hunting from the movie Good Will Hunting. In this paper, I will discuss Will Hunting’s character’s life designs that can only be attributed to cognitive processes, biological and environmental influencers, and limited feelings of self-efficacy. It is important to note that the character played as the therapist can be evaluated as well because he was also helped by the same measures taken in therapy. However, we are presented with a more rounded case study of Wills life and certain factors that have contributed to it. ENVIRONMENTAL/BIOLOGICAL FACTORS IN PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT An Evaluation of Good Will Hunting: …show more content…

Resiliency is defined as an individual's ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity. Stress and adversity can come in the shape of family or relationship problems, health problems, or workplace and financial worries, among others. In other words, resilience is one's ability to bounce back from a negative experience with "competent functioning". Will's personality can also be analyzed quite effectively from the cognitive perspective. His prowess in mathematics forces him to think abstractly and envision the numbers as physical constructs. He is so successful at this that he solves proofs that Prof. Lambeau worked on for years in a matter of hours. Also, Will's quick thinking and ability to apply his broad swath of knowledge to his everyday life makes him a prime example of Kurt Lewin's theory of field independence. The theory implies that one can understand the observable environment when considering it out of context, a trait that Will demonstrates on numerous occasions. Will, also resemble the Jean Piaget's "schema" theory in which Will has developed many different cognitive and social structures to cope with different situations. As a child he developed a schema that told him to be wary and suspicious of people, as a result of his abuse. As such, he developed a separate structure that told him it was …show more content…

I believe that nurture (environment) determines Will’s personality after all. In the film, it never talked about his true parents; instead the portrayal of his childhood events resolves the riddle why he carried such personality. Moreover, Freud emphasized that heredity is not enough to structure the personality because developing personality requires environmental effects and takes time to travel along from infancy to elder years with one’s self-determination. What is more, Freud also said that our body size may be greatly determined by biological information inherited by our parents, but our learning experience during childhood is what counts in shaping our personality. Besides, Will’s giftedness is also possible to shape his personality, especially his inferiority complexes. Nonetheless, cause of giftedness is still controversial – nature or nurture? It is the mixture of both, so said Perles (2010). It is true to a certain extent that most of the gifted children and adults suffer from inferiority complexes, claimed by Silverman (n.d.). To explain further, they tend to find themselves lacking in every aspects although they know about it, and they also rarely compare themselves with their classmates. Therefore, giftedness leads one into developing inferiority complexes which is another answer to explain why Will is so much inferior in all the

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