• Question: Do you develope your personality as you grow or is it something your born with which takes time to become apparent?

    Asked by fisherjwh to Helen, Jenni, Mark, Martin, Stu on 24 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jenni Tilley

      Jenni Tilley answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Ah, the age old question of nature versus nurture.

      As much as we’d like to think it’s one or the other, it’s really a mixture of both your genes AND your environment. Your presonality develops as you expereince lifem but you’re also born with certain traits that will infulence your exprience of life. Complicated hey!?

    • Photo: Stuart Mourton

      Stuart Mourton answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      As Jenni says, it’s most likley to be a combination of both. What is very interesting though is how we can alter any pre-dispositions through training, experience and teaching.

    • Photo: Helen O'Connor

      Helen O'Connor answered on 24 Jun 2011:

      When psychologists have studied babies very soon after birth all the way through to being a teenager (these are called longitudinal studies because they cover a long time period) they have found that the basic temperament of the child stays pretty much the same over time (temperament is their general nature – for example if they are introvert or extravert) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperament

      But psychologists also have noticed that our genes interact with environmental factors to make up our overall personality. Environmental factors are things like our family, the type of education we have, the food we eat, any diseases we might catch, the school we go to, our friends, good or bad things that might happen to us in our lives, etc.

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