Impact of Environment on Character and Behavior. Social Sciences Essay

Impact of Environment on Character and Behavior
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Human behavior is a complex phenomenon affected by a range different variables with the most important being the physical environment. In this case, the environment of a human being involves objects, people, concepts and circumstances that they familiarizes with. The pilot in Jeannette Winterson’s “The world and other places” is very sensitive to unfamiliar places and reacts differently to each aspect of his environment. Similarly, the character from Alain de Botton’s book “On Habit” also appears very sentimental about his environment and every aspect that he interacts with. This essay will draw analysis on the impact of a person’s surrounding to his behavior and form a personal position on the environmental impacts on human behavior.
First, De Botton views the world as a negative phenomenon and on different occasions describes it as dark, boring and uninteresting. I believe that there is a different perspective to the world and the only way to view it differently is de-habituating it. As we live in this busy world we tend to attach meaning to only the important things or aspects of it that guarantee our attainment of the primary goals such as making it to work, catching a bus, getting to a store and more, we make living to be a habitual experience and the only way to break away from the shackles of the restraints of the dark unrewarding world is by learning to remove the impressions that we have already attached to a place or event. As De Botton argues, in order to see the real world, one must dissociate elements of their environment with the uses they have originally found for them.
Clearly, once we walk away from the mental prejudice that we all have of the environment we live in, and realize that every being in that environment views it completely different from us, only then can we accept the positivity that surrounds it. Moreover, we have been accustomed to seeing the world in the perspectives that other people in our vicinity expect us to and in the process forgotten how we initially felt about the world. Evidently, the people we surround ourselves with also dictate how we behave since unknowingly we always strive to impress. In order to have a positive view of the world, there is need to detach from the original perspectives and treat a place as though we have never seen it before or been there; only then can we notice the beauty that lies around.
Changing one’s physical environment can definitely change their behavior and character. Elements of environment which may affect behavior include people, objects, circumstances and conditions. For instance, De Botton argues that your character when alone can be totally different than when another human being is with you. There is a feeling which comes around only when we are alone that changes our whole identity from being uptight, introverted, reserved into considerate, open and observant. The author argues that initially he had not seen the beautiful architecture of the shops or imagined being interested in flyovers...