What Exactly is Personality?
You think about personality far more often than you give yourself credit for. Someone snaps at a colleague and you quietly wonder why. A friend goes quiet at dinner and you start guessing what is going on inside their head. These little assessments run in the background of ordinary days, and they are not so different from the work personality psychologists do. The researchers zero in on the small characteristics behind how a person behaves, then stretch those observations across whole populations. Years of that work have produced a stack of theories, each trying to explain why certain traits take root in some people and not others. Pay attention for a while and you will spot the patterns yourself: families that share a certain temperament, groups of close friends who drift toward the same habits, dominant traits that show up again and again among people who spend their time together.
One odd fact sits at the center of the subject. There is no single agreed definition of personality. Plenty of experts have written their own version over the decades. Put loosely, personality is the mix of thoughts, behaviors, recurring patterns and feelings that make you recognizably you. It also tends to hold steady across a lifetime. It comes from inside, and while the outside world can nudge and shape it, those outside forces usually move the needle only a little.
If you break a personality down, four main pieces tend to come up. Patterns of emotion and thought matter, and so do the particular traits a person carries. A few other building blocks round out the picture.
The first is biological and psychological. Personality is a psychological construct at heart, but researchers have found that biological needs and processes also feed into it, quietly steering some of what you do.
The second is that it shows up in more than one place. No single behavior accounts for a personality. You can read it in a person's thoughts, their close relationships, their feelings, the way they handle social situations. Even how someone approaches work or study carries their stamp.
The third is consistency. Personality holds its shape. Drop a person into different situations and they tend to respond in much the same way each time, give or take.
The fourth is influence. Your personality shapes how you move through and react to your surroundings, but it does not stop there. It pushes you toward specific actions, nudging you to behave in particular ways rather than others.
Several theories give researchers a starting point, and a handful come up most often. Type theories belong to the earlier wave of thinking; they argue that biology accounts for a small set of fixed personality types. Behavioral theories, by contrast, look at how you interact with your environment and how that shapes who you become, and they set aside the idea that inner feelings and private thoughts do the shaping. B.F. Skinner is the name most people attach to that camp. Trait theories go after genetically based internal characteristics and how those produce the personality you end up with, and a cluster of smaller theories lives under that heading. Psychodynamic theories trace back mostly to Sigmund Freud, who looked at the unconscious and at the developmental stages he believed mold a person over time.
So personality turns out to be a tangled thing, worth sitting with if you want to actually understand it. What you have here are the familiar basics, enough of a foothold to go deeper. Keep reading and researching and you may find that some of what you were sure about turns out to be wrong, and some of what you dismissed turns out to be right. Starting with the fundamentals at least gives you a working sense of how personality forms and how it presses on the course of a person's life.
References: psychology.about.com (behavioral psychology section); peacebenwilliams.com ("Let's Play: What is Your True Personality?").