personality

First, personality is unique to individual people.

In other words, each person has a unique personality profile. This is even the case for identical twins.

Our biology, our culture, and our life experiences, what we have learned, and how we think about ourselves all contribute to a unique personality that no one else has.

A second common feature is that personality should be consistent.

Most personality psychologists agree that personality is consistent across different situations and across time, even as we get older. In other words, how we portray ourselves to other people is generally stable across situations. Of course, we all do impression management depending on whom we are talking to, but the core aspects of personality remain constant. This does not mean that personality can’t change at all, but the general consensus is that personality traits are stable and don’t drastically change over time.

The third key feature is that personality influences us.

Our unique personality will influence the things we do in our lives and how we act.

For instance, the activities we choose to do, our majors in college, our career paths, and our relationships have all been found to be directly influenced by personality traits. Psychology researchers are interested in studying how certain features of personality predict all these later outcomes. Using sophisticated measures of personality, they are able to predict with a high degree of accuracy how people will most likely behave later on, based on these personality scores.

What Is Personality?