Our Personalities Have a Big Say in Our Life Outcomes

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Imagine you had to explain the concept of personality to a group of (friendly and curious) aliens.

You could start with the etymology of the word: persona in Latin refers to the mask worn in Roman theatres through which (per) resounded the voice of the actor (sonat).

You could explain that in modern times, humans use this word as an umbrella term to characterize individual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, and bring examples of different personalities in action: You prefer peaceful walks in nature; your chatty sister likes to be the center of attention; your neighbor seems perpetually grumpy.

You could ask your alien guests questions that gauge their habitual inclinations in various situations and illustrate how they differ from one another.

Or, you could offer the two variables psychologists consider when using the word “personality.” These include dispositions (i.e. enduring and distinctive psychological tendencies that best describe individuals) and mental functioning (i.e., how individual’s distinctive psychological systems, including their individuating thoughts, emotions and motivations connect with each other) (Cervone & Pervin, 2022).

Often, we tend to equate dispositional scores with mental functioning. For example, we might presume that people who share similar dispositional scores on a particular trait (e.g., conscientiousness) also share a mental structure. This, according to personality psychologist Daniel Cervone, is one of the greatest myths of personality psychology.

“If two people share the same low score in conscientiousness, it can be due to very different reasons,” Cervone writes. “For example, attention deficit disorder (which causes them to struggle with 'self-discipline' – a component of conscientiousness); a rebellious, intentional rejection of societal norms (which causes them to reject social 'duties' – another component of conscientiousness); or depression (which causes them to feel as if they are not competent and cannot achieve excellence – again, components of conscientiousness).”

As Cervone points out, sharing similar personality profiles doesn’t mean that people are psychologically identical. Like the Roman actors wearing their masks, we wear our personalities differently.

Here are 3 insights into personality from psychological research.

1. Personality is malleable.

Despite the common misconception of the set-in-stone nature of personality, our traits are dynamic and susceptible to modification in response to environmental and behavioral changes. Moreover, unlike inherited physiological features, most psychological tendencies have variability. “No one is anxious all the time, in all situations,” says Cervone. “Anxiety can’t be analogous to inheriting brown eyes, because you keep your eye color regardless of your circumstances.”

Personality appears to be most suseptible to change when the individual is either in their younger years or older adulthood, with rank-order stability of traits peaking around age 60. As we grow older, our personalities psychologically mature along with us. However, the timing, rate and even direction of personality change can vary across individuals.

How does this change occur?

One route is through repeated, habit-forming behaviors that reinforce new states, which eventually generalize across different domains and, in turn, facilitate trait changes.

For example, let’s say you tend to worry a lot and overthink things and would like to live with more ease and joy. You could acquire new worldviews and ways of thinking, learn new emotion regulation techniques, and adopt new behaviors. When these new patterns of thoughts, behaviors, and feelings become your habitual states and begin to generalize to broader situations, over time, according to Cervone, these changes will affect your personality.

2. Culture influences personality.

Personality is shaped by both genetic and environmental features, including culture. Culture is considered to be a “key determinant” of what it means to be a person. Influenced by ecological, historical, religious, socio-economic and philosophical factors, cultures sanction their own unique rituals, beliefs and patterns of behavior (Cervone & Pervin, 2022). Cultural practices, in turn, affect the construal of the “self” (i.e. interdependent or independent) and its role in the world.

Both within and between cultures, studies have shown links between socialization practices and personality development. For example, when children are raised in households where parents routinely treat them with acceptance and comforting, they nurture postive traits such as emotional stability, sociability, and feeling self-adequate. In contrast, when parents reject their children, for example through abuse or neglect, children become adults who are “hostile, unresponsive, unstable, immaturely dependent, and have impaired self-esteem and a negative world view” (Triandis & Suh, 2002).

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As a recent study across 49 countries found, even country-level rates of the Dark Triad traits (narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) are sensitive to a population’s social, political, and economic development, as well as cultural values.

“The less developed, less free, more corrupt, less peaceful, and more sex-asymmetrical a country is, the more narcissistic its population is,” write authors Jonason et al (2022). These results, they add, converge with predictions from evolutionary psychology about narcissism as an adaptation to “enable people to compete for limited resources in competitive environments.”

Furthermore, the study also found that countries that scored higher on Machiavellianism were more advanced on gender equality.

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3. Personality influences well-being outcomes.

The link between personality and mental health outcomes is well established. A recent study found that both the Big Five and HEXACO frameworks are similarly effective in predicting well-being.

“For the Big Five model, [lower] neuroticism is a very strong predictor, extraversion and conscientiousness are fairly strong, and openness and agreeableness are more moderate. For the HEXACO model, extraversion is a very strong predictor […], conscientiousness is fairly strong, and honesty-humility, emotionality, agreeableness, and openness are more modest” (Anglim et al, 2020).

The authors add that across both these frameworks, what constitutes much of the effect of personality on well-being is the penchance to experience low levels of negative emotions and high levels of positive emotions.

Indeed, personality effects are reflected in the choices we make, “how we approach and avoid certain situations, develop skills, and respond to our circumstances of everyday experiences,” writes Cervone of the “agentic ability” of personality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, knowing ourselves is critically important. Not necessarily because the knowing is always accurate, suggests Cervone, but because the knowing is “causally influential.” In other words, self-knowledge can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“If I know that I’ll be good at this or bad at that, I’ll end up shaping my world in which I experience this and not that. Even if the person knows themselves incorrectly, it’s still self-fulfilling. Much of personality is driven by what people believe about themselves, whether that belief is accurate or not. The dictum “Thinking makes it so” is where personality psychologists, cognitive therapists and Shakespeare have something in common.”

As research and experience show, our personalities have a big say in how we fare in life. Yet, as most things in the human experience are less rigid and more composite than they appear, we might have more say on our personalities than we realize.

Many thanks to Daniel Cervone, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago, for his time and insights. His latest book is Personality: Theory and Research (2022).