Shaping Student's Personality through Experience-Taking

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these thing—T.S Elliot. Immemorially, literature which defines literally as letter had been became a persuasive way to affect someone’s personality. Researched at Ohio State University showed that students who read fictional books involved their emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and personal responses within the characters in the books as their own feeling. People subconsciously affected by a particular character in a literary works that they read in a way dubbed “Experience-taking.” Realize that the phenomenon potentially beneficial and applicable to shape students personality; this paper which referenced from the review of Journal Personality and Social Psychology, will discuss briefly about experience-taking and the hypothesis of shaping students personality through experience-taking. 

“Experience-taking” a new term created by Geoff Kaufman and his assistant Lisa Libby, defines as someone’s accessibility to adopt their thought, emotions, behaviors, and personal responses to match some particular characters in the fictional books they read. The affective affinities of the fictional books are potentially elicited compassion of the readers; it is the way experience-taking worked within the readers. Researches assert the fact that experience-taking can only happen when readers are forgotten themselves and their concept of life when they try to get involved in the story. Besides that, the merger between the readers and the characters that occur in the story is better happen when the characters revealed as a first-person narrative. Additionally, in the experience-taking phenomenon, the more the readers involve, the better affection happens toward the reader’s behavior afterwards.

Since many studies discovered that fictional books can affect reader’s personality, it is possible to make a hypothesis about experience taking and the most possible hypothesis is shaping student’s personality through experience taking. Abundance of favorable goals is set toward student’s personality changing through experience-taking. For instance, after read fictional books that given, students having an imaginative process of thinking and subconsciously adopted the way the story characters think and feel, and then the students are able to be religious, discipline, hard-work, responsible, and its line. Need to be noted, the books that given should be contain those characteristics.

For sum up, even the experience-taking phenomenon is quite new in psychology field of study, but it is convincingly stoned for fictional books lover. Whereas, teachers and the other educational stakeholders need a really big effort on facing a vary problems within student’s personality, experience-taking is quite prone to be conducted. Indeed, experience-taking is needed to be applied for students, so the students’ subconsciously change their behavior and having the better personality.