Your Personality: Who’s in Charge?

Your personality is at the center of your core self. What do you know about how your personality works to make you the person that you are? Do you control it — or does it control you? Can you change parts of your personality if you don’t like them? How did you end up with the personality you have? Does your personality influence your political affiliations?

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The question is simple: who are you? Arriving at an answer to this question may not be so simple.

What perspective do you use to describe the you that is you?

Do you frame your answer by referencing your job, career goals, passions, loves, grievances, fears, and hopes?

How about describing your characteristic behaviors — habits, quirks, sense of humor, relationship values, response to threats, willingness to take risks, and political preferences?

If you choose to describe the “you that is you” in terms of your characteristic behaviors, then you are framing yourself in terms of your personality. You also communicate about your personality when you talk about your fears, hopes, values, goals, and passions.

Learning about your personality is a sure path to learning about your core self. What you believe and how you relate to your social and physical worlds are shaped by the personal traits that make up your core self.

What is a personality?

The term personality is often misused in our culture. A person who is well-known in the media and has a following is known as “a personality.” Someone who presents themselves with flair and style is said to have “a lot of personality.”

Do you feel these notable people have personalities and you don’t?

Rest assured, you do indeed have a personality. People know you by the words and actions that characterize your routines.

Every characteristic thought, attitude, and emotion is part of your personality. No matter how mundane or quirky, every effort you show to the world is part of your personality.

In short, personality is everything typical of “you.” It includes your behavioral traits, cognitive style, the patterns of your interpersonal relations, as well as your goals and motivations.

You are the sum of your personality traits, and yet you are much more than this sum.

While some aspects of your personality can change over time, much of the “you that is you” remains relatively consistent throughout life. With some variations, the you of today will likely be the you of tomorrow.

What We Can Learn From Studies of Twins

One way to learn more about your personality and how it shapes your life is by studying examples of identical twins who were separated at birth and raised without knowing each other’s existence (albeit we are learning from unfortunate circumstances).

Identical twins present different stories about their personalities than fraternal twins. Identical twins (monozygotic) begin their life at conception as a single egg fertilized by a single sperm cell. This singular ovum quickly divides into two embryos.

Because they originate from the same genetic material, the twin eggs share the exact genetic blueprint or genome, making them biologically identical, except for some random mutations that may occur after the split.

In contrast, fraternal twins begin life as two eggs, each fertilized by separate sperm cells. Fraternal twins (dizygotic) are no more genetically similar than non-twin siblings born to the same parents.

Identical twins share 100% of their genetic material. Fraternal twins share 50% of their genetic material, as do non-twin siblings.

Meet the Personality Doppelgängers

What if one day, in middle age, you learned that you have an identical twin you never knew about? You might be in shock and disbelief over this reality.

You would be justified in feeling anger toward the adoption dolts who perpetrated this injustice. But after the initial shock, you might wonder who your genetic counterpart might be and how you are both alike or different.

Keeping these questions in mind, I present the highlights of three sets of twins who learned about their identical twins as adults. I briefly describe their separation circumstances and reunions. Relevant to our discussion of personality, I also note a partial list of their character traits. For each twin set, you will find links to other articles providing more details about their reunions and lives.

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer (ref1, ref2)

• separated at three weeks (1940) and reunited at the age of 39
• unbeknownst to each family, the infants were named James by their adoptive parents
• one was raised on a farm, the other in a city, 40 miles distant from each other
• suffered from tension headaches beginning at age 13
• had dogs named Toy as youth
• married women named Linda
• divorced the Lindas to marry women named Betty
• had sons whom they named James Alan (although one was named James Allan)
• similar jobs in security (Jim Lewis was a security guard, while Jim Springer had been a deputy sheriff)
• as subjects of an academic study, their medical histories and brain-wave tests were nearly identical
• results of their personality tests were nearly identical.
• Their shared interests and traits included:

a deep passion for music

excelled at math and were poor at spelling

outgoing, adventurous, highly creative, loved taking risks

heavy smokers of the same brand of cigarettes

driving the same model car (Chevy)

vacationed in Florida at the same beach

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein (ref3, ref4)

• adopted by different families at four months and reunited at the age of 35
• sucked their fingers, not their thumbs, as toddlers
• shared similar habits like biting their nails or twisting their hair when anxious
• necks flush red when they are agitated
• have the same taste in food and clothing styles
• edited their high school newspapers
• studied film at their respective universities
• shared the same tastes in books
• have a habit of “air typing”
• pursued a career in writing
• slept with toy bears into their adulthood
• “Actually, I still do that,” admits Schein. “Paula slept with a bear until she met her husband.”

Anais Bordier and Samantha Futerman (ref5, ref6)

• born in Korea and separated at birth, Anais was raised in France, Samantha (Sam) in America
• throughout her childhood, Sam dreamed of an imaginary friend named Ann
• a friend of Sam's saw her doppelgänger in a Youtube video
• Sam believes she may have a twin and begins a social media search
• Sam and Anais were reunited at age 27
• they fell in love with each other “at first sight”
• although 5000 miles apart, they stay in constant contact
• Sam has two older brothers (bio bros of the adoptive parents). Anais has no siblings.
• Sam has “thicker skin” than Anais, probably because of life with brothers
• They share many likes and dislikes:

Hate cooked carrots in soup

When looking at a restaurant menu, each declares she wants everything

Partial to the same curse words and animal costumes for Halloween

Both developed “nerve disorders” around the same age and bite their nails

Both cope with stress by napping

Both have artistic career pursuits: for Anais, fashion; for Sam, acting.

On a personality measurement scale, both had identical scores for the traits of openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.

The Foundations of Personality

In 1943, Winston Churchill gave a speech about rebuilding the House of Commons Chamber, which was destroyed during the German Blitz in 1941. In that speech, Churchill said: “We shape our buildings, and afterward, our buildings shape us.”

Churchill’s observation is profound. A building’s design shapes the interactions of the people who inhabit it, shaping their social relations.

A personality is like a building. It is the bio-framework within which the “you that is you” exits. This living structure is made of genetic material that serves as the foundation for your self-identity. However, unlike a rigid physical building, your personality interacts with and is shaped to a degree by your environment.

Thanks to genetics, your personality is stable over time. And yet, thanks to “bio-plasticity,” your personality is responsive to the environment in which you live, so it is a bit more shape-shifting than a rigid building.

The Nature vs. Nurture Conundrum

Since the times of the ancient Greeks, philosophers and scientists have pondered the nature of human nature.

They debated the same questions you may have asked about your “self:” Who am I, and how did I become the person I am?

Artistotle apparently never met identical twins because he believed the human mind was a “blank slate” at birth. Over a few millennia, the notion of humans being born as blank slates evolved into “tabula rasa.” In 1690, the English philosopher and physician John Locke wrote that the human mind at birth is a “white paper, void of all characters,” upon which knowledge from experience is written.

More recently, the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who developed the concept of reinforcement learning, firmly believed in experience as the foundation of all behavioral traits.

The notion that there might be more to an individual’s identity than life’s experiences (nurture) began to give way with the publication of numerous studies of identical twins separated at birth. I gave you snippets of these remarkable similarities in the three twin sets.

Just about all scientists from many disciplines now believe that our self-identities evolve through a combination of nature (heritable genetics) and nurture (life experiences).

Today, the debate is no longer nature vs. nurture, but rather the relative weight of nature to nurture affecting the behavioral traits that make up our personalities. This ratio is now expressed in science as genetics x environment — or GxE.

Our Behavioral and Cognitive Predispositions

Understanding personality dynamics helps you learn about how you became you.

We have learned from twin studies that our human nature is a product of genetics, parenting, socialization, and independent (post-parent) living. The twin studies conducted by social scientists have yielded significant correlational findings about the GxE factor.

However, correlations do not imply causality. Geneticists are searching for the causal factors that explain the outcomes of gene/environment interactions.

The GxE factor helps explain how we develop behavioral and cognitive dispositions to think and act in particular ways under particular circumstances. These predispositions can help explain our political leanings toward liberal or conservative ideologies.

A growing body of research supports the proposition that we have behavioral and cognitive predispositions. I will write more about personality predispositions in future essays.

Personality predispositions do not mean that our thoughts and actions are pre-determined. We are not bio-agents whose every behavior is linked to a set of genes that push us forward in some mechanical lock-step fashion.

At the same time, we are not entirely free agents who make bias-free decisions by rationally reviewing all evidence and choosing options that benefit our well-being.

Learning about personality, how our personalities work, and the biases by which we view the world can bring us one step closer to understanding our societal differences and prejudices.

References

Bleidorn, W., Kandler, C., & Caspi, A. (2014). The Behavioural Genetics of Personality Development in Adulthood — Classic, Contemporary, and Future Trends. European Journal of Personality, 28(3), 244–255. doi:10.1002/per.1957

Kagan, J. (2010). The Temperamental Thread: How Genes, Culture, Time, and Luck Make Us Who We Are.

Kagan, J. (2021). A Trio of Pursuits: Puzzles in Human Development

Plomin, R. (2019). Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.

Saudino, K. J., & Ganiban, J. M. (Eds.). (2020). Behavior Genetics of Temperament and Personality. New York: Springer.