By now you should know that personality is the fairly fixed patterns of our thoughts, emotions and behavior under different circumstances. Our personality makes us act in certain ways-- it gives us a consistent tendency to behave in a certain manner. Therefore, consistency is a core concept of personality. But how stable is our behavior? Different psychologists have different opinions. There has been a lot of research on stability of behavior over time and across situations, which is behavioral consistency.

There has been research on the study of stability of children's behavior, however, there has been different interpretations on the results because some behaviors and some phases in development are more stable than the others. An example of a reasonably stable behavior pattern is aggression. Children who appear to be aggressive may grow up to be aggressive adults. Generally, children's behavior become more stable as they become older.

To make matters even more complicated, some characteristics may be shown in different ways at different ages. "Well, what does this mean?" you may ask. Here are two examples:

A child is aggressive. In kindergarten, the child may hit others. As he/she becomes older, the physical attacks may turn into verbal ones, like insults and criticism.

A child who is sociable may take the initiative in inviting other children to play. When he/she grows older, he/she may display this sociability by hanging out with friends or talking on phone often.

And because of this, psychologists examine the stability of a child's behavior by comparing his/her different expressions of different personality characteristics (eg. aggression and sociability) at different ages.

Produced for Thinkquest Internet Challenge 2000.

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