Personality. What is it? And Can I CHANGE it??

What Is Personality?

Do you like talking to others? Are you agreeable or not?
Personality is a multifaceted and colorful entity. It refers to a person’s idiosyncratic patterns of thinking, feeling, sensing and behaving. It stems from a blend of inherent natures and preferences along with environmental factors and experiences. Although it can change over a lifetime, one’s core personality traits tend to remain relatively consistent during adulthood. So…you can change but you can’t. Great.

Now, there are numerous characteristics that combine in an almost inestimable number of ways to form our personality. In fact, people have been trying to find a way to classify them ever since the ancient Greeks suggested four basic tempers. Today, psychologists often describe personality in terms of five basic traits. The so-called Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

What’s My Personality Type?

Many dedicated readers have been asking this question since I first talked about it in this article. Well, it’s a bit complicated.
The idea of a personality “type” is fairly well-known. We typically associate a “Type A” with a more organized, rigid, competitive, and anxious person, for example. Yet there’s little empirical support for the idea. Otherwise, I’m sure we’re all gonna be unhappy with those results! Moreover, the personality types by the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) have also been challenged by scientists. Great. Just great. We will never know who we truly are.

Furthermore, psychologists who study personality believe such typologies are generally too simplistic to account for the ways people differ. Instead, they tend to rely on frameworks like the Big Five model of trait dimensions. In the Big Five model, each individual falls somewhere on a continuum for each trait—compared to the rest of the population, a person may rate relatively high or low on a trait such as extraversion or agreeableness, or on more specific facets of each (such as assertiveness or compassion). The combination of these varying trait levels describes one’s personality.

To assess these discrete differences, a variety of personality tests have been created. YAY! These tests commonly prompt people to indicate the extent to which various descriptions of thinking or behavior reflect their own tendencies. Moreover,  based on a person’s responses, the test yields a “personality type” description (in the case of a test like the MBTI).

Continued

Now. This is where it gets INTERESTING!! Psychology can help people better grasp and articulate what they are like and how they compare to others. But the details of personality are relevant to more than just a person’s self-image.

The tendencies in thinking and behaving that concepts like the Big Five represent are related to a variety of other characteristics and outcomes on which people compare to one another. These include differences in personal success, health and well-being, and how people get along with others. Even the risk of dying appears to be associated to some degree with differences in personality traits. Who knew, right?

Origination of Personality?

Hold on to yourself. It’s time to uncover a deep truth!!
Why individuals develop the way they do and how much someone’s personality typically changes over time are some of the biggest questions in psychology. I mean, who doesn’t want to know?? Science provides some answers, but there is still plenty of room for debate and exploration. Yeah. We’re still asking and searching. We’ll let you know when the good stuff finally arrives!

So, genetics partly helps to account for differences in personality traits, but other influences certainly play a role. A range of theories have been proposed to explain what personality is and why individuals become who they are, with some focusing more heavily than others on potential non-genetic factors, such as a person’s taking on new social roles (like spouse or parent).

Want to learn about INFJ or INFP types?
Curious about more? Awesome. Join the club. And check this out!!