So my topic of discussion for today will be personality. But not a personal instance of personality, as I think that would require way too much background to be of any use, and there's not much to go there other than describing it and maybe attributing events to its creation. I'll be examining the characters in South Park and seeing how they verify the different theories of personality theories and plausible their personalities are. I'll choose only a few exemplary instances and elucidate on them.
To maintain some comprehensibility and make the characters somewhat believable, the creators of South Park have to make at least some elements of behavior that seem realistic. The above is an example of something that's on the very edge of believability. If you ignore the fact that Kenny can't in fact die and inexplicably come back to life after each episode, Kyle's and Stan's reactions can be described using behaviorist theory. Every time Kenny dies their use of those phrases of profanity help alleviate the stress of losing Kenny, ie. negative reinforcement. Technically, this counts as part of their personalities since it is a consistent behavior, so I'm not entirely making this up.
Eric Cartman also shows some clearly consistent behaviors. His general anger and frustrations can be seen as his cognitive dissonance in humanistic theory developed by Carl Rogers. His self-image, of which we see parts of in various episodes, particularly the one involving Kayne West, doesn't reflect his true identity, thereby causing this disparity. He also exhibits clear sociopathic tendencies, also more euphemismically called antisocial personality, as is fairly obvious throughout many if not all of the episodes.
Furthermore, Cartman seems to be displacement his frustration at this cognitive dissonance onto the Jewish people, which is similar to what Hitler may have done. (Yes, Godwin's Law has been followed in this discussion. ) Actually, examining the roots of Hitler's hatred of Jews will add to this discussion, since the creators seem to have meant Cartman to be some form of parody of Hitler, or at least they make many, many, many references to that similarity.
Onto to analyzing the personality of what could easily be described as the evilest man of the 20th century using first year psych knowledge and a similarly limited understanding of World War II. Based on Wikipedia's entry on the Mein Kampf, Hitler seems to have become anti-Semitic after some event occurred, meaning it comes down to tracing the event that led to his anti-Semiticism. I'm guessing this event was probably the end of WWI, when Germans started to blame the Jews for causing their defeat. This seems to be the superficial reason behind it, but there's probably some more events before this that led to his ability to take it to such an extent with so little reason. But that'd require a lot of work and reading a couple biographies, probably. Hope this is good enough. Can I blame it on his family life?
[The above is not my property, it is the property of both various other parties as well as my mind. Although I personally would have no trouble with you using any of the above, my mind, and other affiliates, may. Sorry. ]
