People's thinking is affected by the parents who raised them, the types of education they accept and their friends, the neighborhood they connect with. If people leave their familiar environment, the way they handle the same thing may be different because they do not have prior experience in handling that situation. “Character, then, is not what we think it is or rather what we want it to be. It is not a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a problem in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a set of habits, tendencies, and interests, loosely related to each other and dependent, at times, on circumstance and context. The reason most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment” (Malcolm Gladwell 160). People living in a similar environment may have a stable character. However, people's character changes when the environment around them changes. People feel safe when they are at home, but they feel nervous and anxious when they are in another country and speaking a different language.