Tags / 22 quotes from 6 sources
#personality
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Temperament versus personality
Parents have known for centuries that babies come to this world with an inborn temperament. Scientist Jerome Kagan, who studied Baby 19, was the first to prove it. Human temperament is a complex, multidimensional concept—a child’s characteristic way of responding emotionally…
Temperament is not just in the genes
So you can see temperament at birth, and it remains stable over time. Does that mean temperament is completely controlled by genes? Hardly. As we saw with the ice-storm children in the Pregnancy chapter, it is possible to create a stressed baby simply by increasing the mother’s…
Edge.org
Nature vs nurture is a misplaced dychotomy
The most elementary error that people make in interpreting the effects of genes versus those of the environment is to assume that you can truly separate one from the other. Donald Hebb, the brilliant Canadian neuropsychologist, when asked whether nature or nurture contribute…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
The personality ethic
But shortly after World War 1 the basic view of success shifted from the Character Ethic to what we might call the Personality Ethic. Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the processes…
Letting our son's personality emerge
We decided to relax and get out of his way and let his own personality emerge. We saw our natural role as being to affirm, enjoy, and value him. We also conscientiously worked on our motives and cultivated internal sources of security so that our own feelings of worth were not…
Personality skills are secondary, not primary
I am not suggesting that elements of the Personality Ethic—personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking—are not beneficial, in fact sometimes essential for success. I believe they are. But these are…
Getting by in artificial social systems
In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make…
Character communicates most eloquently
But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success…
Fromm on the automaton personality
In the words of Erich Fromm, an astute observer of the roots and fruits of the Personality Ethic: Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The ego as an onion with no kernel
You will feel like an onion: skin after skin, subterfuge after subterfuge, is pulled off to find no kernel at the center. Which is the whole point: to find out that the ego is indeed a fake—a wall of defense around a wall of defense … around nothing. You can’t even want to get…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Western and East Asian minds aren't so far apart
then we are talking about real and significant differences between the western and East Asian mind, including how westerners and easterners see themselves and others. Nevertheless, Nisbett is right not to make too much of this. It’s not as though the two cultures are so far…
Psychological continuity as overlapping connections
modern advocates of psychological continuity as the basis for personal identity over time see memory as just one of a number of psychological connections over time that contribute to this continuity, and they see this continuity in terms of overlapping connections, not rigid…
Dementia as peeling the onion to its core
This is closer to the view taken by Janet and her daughter Jackie, who run the care home where Linda is now a resident. Janet utterly rejects the common view that dementia is the slow death of the self. ‘I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so…
Personality survives failing memory
What gives this view some credence is the extent to which personality remains, even as memory and other cognitive capacities fail. ‘One of the things with the residents here that you see time and time again is that they behave in character,’ says Jackie.
Robert Oxnam's eleven alters
The castle and all its inhabitants were contained within the head of one man: Robert B. Oxnam. Oxnam was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), more commonly, but anachronistically, known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In his account of his life with DID, A…
Are alters created by therapy?
Confabulation is not only a potential problem when it comes to causes, however. Could it also be that the alters are themselves brought into being by the therapeutic process, rather than simply brought to light by them?
Multiplicity is a spectrum
Could it not rather be the case that the extent to which we perceive ourselves as one or many is in fact highly variable? That’s what the science writer Rita Carter came to believe after researching her book Multiplicity. ‘Multiplicity is a spectrum,’ she told me when I caught…
The pearl view of character
Pearl-like assumptions about the self are perhaps most stubborn when it comes to the idea of character. Almost everyone seems to believe that their personality is a consistent combination of traits which is, paradoxically, both unique and classifiable in any number of different…
People typically lack character
‘situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors … In very many situations it looks as though personality is less than robustly determinative of behaviour. To put things crudely, people typically lack character.’
Episodics and diachronics
Strawson is perhaps best known for his articulation of one such axis of variability in persons, between short- and long-termers, or what he calls episodics and diachronics. ‘Here what I think you find is that people fall along a spectrum,’ he told me. ‘At one end of the…
Integrated people are becoming dinosaurs
‘Everything’s exploded in the last twenty years. You will get people who, even if they still live in the same community and a very stable family situation, are subject to a thousand different cultures every time they walk out of the door. Every one of those impacts produces a…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Erikson's eight ages of man
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, which is called the Eight Ages of Man, covers the entire life span of a human being. It is Erikson’s idea that there is a task that must be accomplished at each stage of development. Successful resolution of each stage affects the…