Driving Questions

Core Personality

People are weird. I’ve always wondered if people are born that way or develop from their surroundings. From my experience, people I know from elementary school have changed greatly over the years in some ways, but have stayed the same in others. I was in a program called T.A.G (Talented and Gifted) later changed to Explorers because kids felt left out. This program was great but it made us members of it develop in a way that gave us the feeling that we didn’t have to put in as much effort as the other kids. We felt like we didn’t have to do normal work and put in less time and effort in homework and schoolwork. This has stuck with most of us over the years as I’ve seen we became average or maybe even below average because of the effort we put in.

I took a psychology class in my Junior year of high school and learned about all these theories from different psychologists. There is no one answer, which makes me wonder even more. The four main theories are psychodynamic perspective: which believes in the unconscious mind and early childhood experiences shaping your mind, humanistic perspective: which believes that you can have free will, trait perspective: which believes in measuring certain traits in people to establish differences, and social cognitive perspective: believing personality is shaped by observing and imitating others that you see. Do we have a core personality that stays the same throughout our lives?

The first memory that I still remember is dancing in the living room while listening to the Beatles CD my mom had titled “1”. I was about 5 or 6 years old when this took place. I still often listen to some of the songs on this CD, listening to this type of music from such a young age formed my music taste today. The music you grow up listening to can definitely stick with you as you grow up. 

I’m sure everyone has a memory or experiences growing up that shaped who they are. Some people have had their core personality shaped by the adults in their life growing up. My friend Zach received much positive encouragement after doing poorly on a test, his “family and teachers believed [he] could do better and [he] truly believed that” and with the encouragement of these adults he grew confidence, which has stuck with him today. These core experiences growing up definitely shape your personality in a way. You don’t just grow personality traits, my friend David says, “[his] grandpa taught [him] a lot of useful stuff that shaped [his] interests,” these being his interest in building stuff with wood and metal. Your youth experiences do have some sort of impact on your core personality. 

Sometimes repeated experiences force you to wonder who you really are, but that can change. Alexander Chee always was told, “Girl, you are mixed, aren’t you? But you can pass. . .  as if this was a good thing.” Hearing this all the time he felt like he did not belong with a certain group of people and as a result had to dress up as someone who he was not in order to feel like he was fitting in. Hearing this all the time really changed who he was. He had to experiment around to find his true identity and came to the conclusion that “sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask,” from his perspective, your personality will change over time but in order to find it you need to experiment and sometimes must be someone who you are not.

The environment which you grow up in also has a large influence on your personality. I asked my friends if they thought they would be a completely different person if they grew up in a country/city environment different from where they actually grew up: all of them said that they would. Your environment growing up can really change how you see the world. Growing up in a high populated city such as New York makes a kid develop different social norms than a kid growing up in a town with a population of 1,000 in Alaska. They would develop different core values which stick with them for the rest of their lives.

Your childhood isn’t the only thing that affects your personality though. As our environment changes, we will develop to better fit in with it. My friend David told me that “you are the average of the five people who you are around most.” I definitely have heard similar things and do see parts of me being changed by people I’m around often. Being around David, a hyperenergetic person who likes to laugh at random things and wonder about stuff, has given me more of those personality traits. Surrounding yourself with people who have personality traits you want is very important as it will rub off on you.

Overall, I believe you have some sort of core personality that can changed based on your surroundings and people you talk to. The experiences we go through impact our core personality whether we realize it or not. If you put yourself near success, you will likely pick up desirable traits. So put yourself in a place with people you want to rub off of, and you will gain traits you want.

Chee, A. (2015, March 16). Girl. Guernica Magazine. https://www.guernicamag.com/girl/