Personality:
A User's Guide
by Daniel Nettle
We are all familiar with the idea that different people
have different personalities, but what does this actually
mean? It implies that different people behave in different
ways, but it must be more than that. After all, different
people find themselves in different circumstances,
and much of their behaviour follows from this fact.
However, our common experience reveals that different
people respond in quite remarkably different ways even
when faced with roughly the same circumstances. Abbey
might be happy to live alone in a quiet and orderly
cottage, go out once a week, and stay in the same job
for thirty years, whilst Beth longs for exotic travel
and needs to be surrounded by vivacious friends and
loud music. Charlie goes through a string of divorces
from marriages that seemed solid, whilst Derek stays
in one that seems unlikely for most of his life. Erica
loves walking and landscape paintings, whilst Fran
likes abstract art, punk rock and bungee jumping. In all of these cases,
we feel that it cannot be just the situation which
is producing the differences in
behaviour. Something about the way the person is ‘wired
up’ seems to be at work, determining how people
react to situations, and, more than that, the kind
of situations they get themselves into in the first
place. This is why personality seems to become stronger
as we get older; when we are young, our situation reflects
external factors such as the social and family environment
we were born into. As we grow older, we are more and
more reaping the consequences of our own choices (living
in places we ourselves have chosen, doing jobs that
we were drawn to, surrounded by people like us whom
we have sought out). Thus, personality differences
that might have been very slight at birth become dramatic
in later adulthood.
Personality, then, seems
to be the set of enduring and stable dispositions that
characterise a person. These dispositions come partly
from the expression of inherent features of the nervous
system, and partly from learning. Researchers sometimes
distinguish between temperament, which refers exclusively
to characteristics that are inborn or directly caused
by biological factors, and personality, which also
includes social and cultural learning. Nervousness
might be a factor of temperament, but religious piety
is an aspect of personality (overlaid, perhaps, on
some temperamental foundation).
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