Problem:
Erving Goffman believed that Shakespeare's notion of "All the world's a stage..." actually characterizes well how people are--that their thinking, feeling, and behavior is situational and that there is little, if anything, beyond situational responses. Other scholars, such as Freud and Erikson, believe that we have stable underlying personality traits, and that people's differing behavior across situations merely reflects differences in how these traits play out. What do you believe? Do people have an underlying core? Or do they have multiple selves? Or do they have both an underlying core and multiple selves? What do current theories and research say about these issues as they apply to adolescent and emerging-adult development? Please draw on your notes and the book to address these questions.