The other evening I was watching So You Think You Can Dance with my wife. One of the contestants got criticized for not being emotionally expressive enough. A few minutes later they showed a clip documenting his growing up in Brooklyn. It was tough for a male dancer.
My wife said, “So that’s why he has trouble expressing himself.” Being ever the critical thinker, I said, “Maybe. But it might just be his personality.”
A quickie test for any hindsight explanation of this type is to see if the same influence could explain an opposite outcome. “That’s why he’s so expressive! He’s had to fight his whole life to survive!” If so . . . good reason to doubt.
Was it the dancer’s nature to be emotionally reserved/inhibited? Or did his social environment nurture and shape this part of him?
In terms of the nature/nurture issue, I have long looked at it this way: While nature likely sets the range of possibilities, nurture determines where in that range a person develops to. Depending on the attribute in question, and the nature of the person in question, that range will sometimes be large, sometimes quite small.
Of course, it’s likely not that simple.
Recent research highlights how personality seems little swayed by nurture, from childhood.
The title to the Eurekalert news release of the study reads: Childhood personality traits predict adult behavior.
The research itself consisted of this -
Using data from a 1960s study of approximately 2,400 ethnically diverse elementary schoolchildren in Hawaii, researchers compared teacher personality ratings of the students with videotaped interviews of 144 of those individuals 40 years later.
40 years later!
On a related note, a few weeks ago my wife and I attended her 30th high school reunion. And while many of her friends had changed quite a bit physically, 30 years later “Susan” was still shy, “Bob” a big joker. Etc.
The sub-head to news release says it perfectly -
We remain recognizably the same person, UC Riverside and Oregon researchers find
Lead researcher Christopher S. Nave made this general comment about personality -
“It’s a part of us, a part of our biology.”
I wonder, way back in the crib was I on track to becoming a skeptical thinker? Or is that a trait with a wider range of possible outcomes?
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Tags: genes, personality
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