Discover a New You With Personality Psychology

Who you are owes a lot to your personality. It shapes the identity other people recognize in you, and it's often what draws them to you in the first place. That alone makes a case for understanding your own personality, and reading other people's, if you want to handle situations well and leave a good impression. Personality psychology is the field that studies how individuals differ in the way they behave and think. We talk about people as though each carries a fixed set of traits: a friend is kind, a teacher is harsh, a kid brother keeps to himself. Push past the single words, though, and things get tangled.

Is your kind friend kind to the person she can't stand? Does the harsh teacher bark at his own wife and children, or soften at home? Your shy brother might be a different creature once the front door closes and only family is around. Behavior shifts with the room we're in. Even so, there seems to be some thread underneath it all, a temperament or core that makes one person recognizably not another. Pinning down what that thread actually is, where personality comes from and how it works, is the job this field sets for itself.

Start with origins. A lot of people picture personality as something you arrive with, a built-in "you" rather than a lesson someone drills into you. There's real support for that. Traits and small mannerisms often echo a parent's, and studies of identical twins turn up strikingly similar dispositions. Biology gets you part of the way toward explaining how a person thinks and acts. Not everyone accepts it as the full story, though. Where you grow up, what happens to you, and the decisions you make leave their own marks. A sunny child who lives through something terrible may turn timid as an adult, or dig in and come out tougher. Genes, upbringing and the choices we're free to make keep bumping against one another, and personality seems to emerge from that back-and-forth.

One of the newer frameworks in the field is the "if…then" profile. The idea runs like this: put a person in a given situation, and it switches on a particular set of thoughts and feelings, which pushes them to behave a certain way. Each of us carries an internal system built from what researchers call cognitive-affective units. An outside event trips one unit, that unit sets off others, and the reaction travels down the chain until it produces an action. How those units are wired up depends on the temperament you were born with, the culture you move in, and the circumstances you land in.

It's a thorough model, and a clever one, but science doesn't stop. Something will replace or revise it eventually. Suppose the "if…then" profiles themselves drift over a person's life. A later model will try to account for that, and another will come after that one. People keep asking what personality really is, so the questions, and the research chasing them, aren't going anywhere.