This is England
Personality Theories Paper Assignment
This Is England: Shaun
In the movie “This Is England”, Shaun, the main character, is an easily influenced twelve year old boy living in London. After his father dies in the Falkland’s war. He is then recruited by a gang of men, ranging from the ages of 16 to 30, called “skinheads”. Eager to please his only friends, he completely immerses himself in a life of bitterness, danger, racism, and drugs. Shaun’s personality is on a rollercoaster of emotions, as his troubled background continues to make his life more difficult. However, the skinheads become his family, and they take over fulfilling the role that his father is unable to.
B. F. Skinner, a firm believer of environment in the nature vs. nurture debate, would have used the behaviorist perspective to describe Shaun’s personality. Behavioral psychologist view people as being controlled by their environment and specifically, that personality is a result of what we have learned from our environment. Basically, they hold that everything we do, and all of our actions, is a learned behavior. Behaviorists believe that the environment has a major impact in shaping our personalities because everything we do is in response to a stimulus or outside force; there is no free will or thinking in behavioral psychology. Skinner used Edward Thorndike’s law of effect to describe what he called, operant conditioning. The law of effect is the principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely. With that in mind, Skinner coined the idea of operant conditioning, in which behavior is either reinforced or punished. A reinforcement is any response that strengthens a behavior, and a punishment is any response that diminishes a behavior.
At one point in the movie, Shaun, who is taken under the wing of his racist father-like figure Combo, goes into a convenience store run by an Indian man, and
This Is England: Shaun
In the movie “This Is England”, Shaun, the main character, is an easily influenced twelve year old boy living in London. After his father dies in the Falkland’s war. He is then recruited by a gang of men, ranging from the ages of 16 to 30, called “skinheads”. Eager to please his only friends, he completely immerses himself in a life of bitterness, danger, racism, and drugs. Shaun’s personality is on a rollercoaster of emotions, as his troubled background continues to make his life more difficult. However, the skinheads become his family, and they take over fulfilling the role that his father is unable to.
B. F. Skinner, a firm believer of environment in the nature vs. nurture debate, would have used the behaviorist perspective to describe Shaun’s personality. Behavioral psychologist view people as being controlled by their environment and specifically, that personality is a result of what we have learned from our environment. Basically, they hold that everything we do, and all of our actions, is a learned behavior. Behaviorists believe that the environment has a major impact in shaping our personalities because everything we do is in response to a stimulus or outside force; there is no free will or thinking in behavioral psychology. Skinner used Edward Thorndike’s law of effect to describe what he called, operant conditioning. The law of effect is the principle that behaviors followed by favorable consequences more likely, and that behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely. With that in mind, Skinner coined the idea of operant conditioning, in which behavior is either reinforced or punished. A reinforcement is any response that strengthens a behavior, and a punishment is any response that diminishes a behavior.
At one point in the movie, Shaun, who is taken under the wing of his racist father-like figure Combo, goes into a convenience store run by an Indian man, and