Personality. Everyone is said to have a personality and more importantly, a different personality. A good personality. An interesting personality. A bad personality. And a lot more… However, most people don’t really know where they got their personality. The origins of one’s personality is frequently discussed in the nature vs. nurture debate, and it is clear that both one’s genes and environments play significant roles in their personality, but to what extent does each factor impact one’s personality?
On one side of the debate, nature refers to the genetics and factors that are inherited from their parents. 50% of your personality is from your parents. Characteristics that are from your genetics are the Big 5 Traits, which include extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The other half of your personality is environmentally influenced, meaning it comes from your surroundings and people involved in your life. These can include your family, your workplace, your school, clubs, activities, etc. Furthermore, environmental effects further partition into shared and non-shared influences. Shared influences include being born in the same family, social economic status, geographic location, parenting style, and culture. However, just because your siblings live in the same household doesn’t mean that you are more similar to them! There is real empirical evidence that identical twins raised together in the same house are not more similar than identical twins raised apart.
Moreover, there are also non-shared environmental effects, which are an individual’s unique environmental influences. Objective influences include friendships outside of home, outside interests and hobbies, and school life. Effective influences occur when the same objective situation is encountered, but it leads to different outcomes due to how each person perceives the situation differently. The more unique environment leads to more individual differences in personality because non-shared environments matter more than shared environments. Shared environments make up for very little of one’s personality.
Yet, it is important to recognize that even though everyone has different genes and encounters more and different experiences throughout life, one’s personality rarely changes over time. In regards to the psychological definition of personality, personality accounts for unique, stable, and consistent patterns of behaviors/thoughts/feelings. Although it may be easy to think that personality can change, scientists have discovered that it is relatively stable.
Therefore, everyone in this world has an interesting and unique personality. Individual differences in personality create the distinctiveness and complexity of the human race.
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