The Simplest Way to Explain the Nature and Nurture of Personality Traits
I’ve been researching the concepts around personality traits for nearly two years now. My conclusion at this point is unique to my purpose of helping people improve their process for pursuing difficult goals. I believe it’s wise to use personality traits as a significant factor for choosing a process. When explaining the why behind this conclusion I often struggle. The psychology behind personality traits is not always easy to understand or explain.
Fortunately, I recently came across what I think is a good starting point for simplifying this complexity. In the book Personality: What makes you the way you are author Daniel Nettle provides a very easy to understand analogy. Nettle states:
Traits are continuous, like height is rather than discrete, like being an apple versus being a pear…
…That is, everyone has all of the five factors of personality, just as everyone has a height and weight. Where we differ is the magnitude of the height and the weight, or the score along each of the five dimensions.
So carrying this analogy forward, some personality traits are more like height and others are more like weight. When you think about height, you inherit a height range from your parents, but not a specific height. What you eat, how you live, and other factors dictate where you ultimately end up in that height range. With that said, height is a factor of nature and nurture, but in general nature is the biggest factor.
When you think about weight, it’s also nature and nurture. However, nurture plays a much bigger factor in weight than it does height. In addition, too much or too little weight has bigger health and quality of life implications than height does.
In addition, the traits that are more like height or more like weight are not discrete either. Some personality traits are more fixed in a range for some than others. All of these nuances are important. The more you understand yourself and how to apply this understanding to your process for pursuing your life goals, the better off you will be.