Эссе на тему: Does personality change over time

In psychology, there has been always been a long standing debate as to how our personality develops. Do humans act, behave and interact in the way we do because of nature, such as our genes inherited from our parents, or nurture, such as our environment, culture, religion or childhood interactions.

The nature-nurture debate is concerned with the relative contribution that both influences make to human behavior, such as personality, cognitive traits, temperament and psychopathology.

Personality is a key part of every single one of us, it determines our moods, our behaviours, how we interact with each other and the decisions we make. Effectively, our personalities make us who we are. This is why, it is crucial to study whether our personality is caused by our ancestors, the environment we grew up in, on perhaps, even both.

If our personality was influenced solely by nature, then we would have inherited genes from our ancestors that influence how our personality is shaped. It’s just the same as how we inherited physical factors such as our eye or hair colour from previous generations, we also could inherit our internal drive and spur that influences our behaviours.

Our environment does play a crucial part in our life; some people are rich, some people are poor. Some people grew up in Kensington, whilst others in rural towns miles away from any fast moving cities. Some people have four sisters, whilst others have no siblings at all. Some people have it easy, whilst others don’t.

Nurture assumes that correlations between environmental factors and psychological outcomes are caused environmentally. For example, how much parents read with their children and how well children learn to read appear to be related. Other examples include environmental stress and its effect on depression.

People select, modify and create environments correlated with their genetic disposition. This means that what sometimes appears to be an environmental influence (nurture) is a genetic influence (nature).

So, children that are genetically predisposed to be competent readers, will be happy to listen to their parents read them stories, and be more likely to encourage this interaction.

The influence of nature and nuture on us is a heavily debated topic. Nature involves the charecterists we inherit through our genes, hence why we often hear the phrases “You’re just like you’re mother/father” from friends or other family members. Whereas, nurture includes the influence of the environment or our surroundings within childhood, on our later personalities and behaviour. Some may say the way we are brought up largely influences the people we become, although it can be argued that niether nature or nurture, but a mix of the two determine this.

One point of view is that nature has the largest influence because of the amount we inherit from our parents. These are the genes that provide a suceptability for certain charecteristics or traits that our parents have.

On the other hand, nuture involves learning from the environment we are in and adapting to our situation and surroundings. Some say when we are born we are said to have a blank slate also known as ‘Tabula Rasa’.  This means we learn all our behaviour and language from the surroundings we are brought up in. Some say humans are more influenced by their enviroment and nuturing than other animals, in terms of immitation and modelling.

Personally, I believe both nature and nurture have an large influence over the people we become in later life and it could be said that they are on a balance, although I believe it would depend between people, as every situation and individual are different. We have the ability to control and change our own behaviour at any point in our lives, therefore it is difficult to argue that either nuture or nature has the largest influence.