Impacts of Personality Traits on Socialization

Character, they say, is who you are when no one is looking. Character forms the basis of personality and the latter can be inferred from the prior. Different people come with different personality traits and they play a major role on how one interacts with others. This is why you will find some people get along easily with others or are easy to get along with whereas some take time before they can fit in. This paper is going to talk on the effects that personality traits has on the process of one’s integration into a new country by reviewing two types of traits: narrow-minded and open-minded.

Narrow-minded individual have a hard time letting people in. They view people as strangers capable of harming them and therefore take their sweet time before getting to trusting them let alone opening up. In the story of buying on time, the father is portrayed as close-minded and has a problem with fitting in the new country. He had a problem trusting foreigners and this is evident in his conversation with Stan where he say, “A fool is always dangerous, but a foreign fool is worse.” He despised the way the foreigners used their money and pretty much everything about them. For instance, he could not understand why one could invest in a lawn chair which could only be used outside.

On the other hand, open-minded people are the exact opposite of this. They are open to new ideas and lifestyles and have great adaptive skills. They understand too well the saying “if you go to Rome, do what Romans do.” A good example of an open-minded person in this story is the mother. She appreciated their culture, building designs and even English. She went ahead and supported them saying just because their English was not similar to theirs does not mean it is wrong.

In conclusion, personality traits will have a direct impact on the time one takes to integrate into a new country.