Do you think aspects of your personality are inherited or learned?

[jacquie4000]

Do you think our personalities are handed down through our parents?

Or do you think we learn them from our parents?

For instance if your parents are always yelling and fighting with you and the rest of the family. Then as you get a little older you end up the same way. Do you believe it is a learned behavior or inherited or both?

Do you think a person can actually ever really change. Or is that change temporary or a constant struggle to change throughout life?

I believe it is a mix some things I believe are inherited others I think are a learned behavior.

How often do you think the cycle is truely broken?

 

[PureX]

Both of my parents grew up with alcoholic parents, yet neither of them became alcoholics, themselves. I think this happened partly because they made a conscious effort not to, and partly because they did not receive the genetic predisposition for alcoholism from their parents. As a result, they were able to learn how to live differently, by responding to life differently from the way their alcoholic parents did. This took a long time, and as my parents they made some mistakes. But because they were sober, they were able to learn from the mistakes they made, and so as they lived they changed, and became less and less like the people who raised them.

I think that who we are comes to us partly as a genetic predisposition, partly through the way we are raised by our parents, and partly through the way we choose to respond to the hand that we've been dealt in life. Neither genetics nor training can FORCE us to follow a given path. They just make it far more likely that we will follow that path if we don't actively choose to resist it.

Change is hard. Perfection is impossible. I'm honored by how my parents have risen above where they came from, and so I want to try and do the same, myself.

 

[FatMan]

Do you think our personalities are handed down through our parents?

Or do you think we learn them from our parents?

For instance if your parents are always yelling and fighting with you and the rest of the family. Then as you get a little older you end up the same way. Do you believe it is a learned behavior or inherited or both?

Do you think a person can actually ever really change. Or is that change temporary or a constant struggle to change throughout life?

I believe it is a mix some things I believe are inherited others I think are a learned behavior.

How often do you think the cycle is truely broken?

It depends on what each person consciously realizes and doesn't. A lot of one's mannerism and gestures including facial gestures are developed by mimicking those who we communicate with while young. Those are learned behaviors.

There are also things like chronically arriving late to an event that if it causes continual embarrassment for the youngster might make it so that they arrive habitually early to events as an adult.

But, all behavior that is developed is learned. Physical appearances and genetic makeup is inherited.

 

[Sunstone]

So far as I understand the science, much of our basic personality is genetically based.

 

[Valjean]

"Do you think aspects of your personality are inherited or learned?"

Yes.

 

[Sunstone]

Do you think our personalities are handed down through our parents?

In the case of some personality traits, up to 80% of the trait is inherited. In other cases, less than half is inherited. How much is inherited and how much is learned varies by trait.

Do you think a person can actually ever really change. Or is that change temporary or a constant struggle to change throughout life?

To change one's basic personality is nearly impossible and would typically take years to do, if it were possible at all. To change more superficial traits is much easier.

 

[Monat]

I think it is a combination of the two. You can really see how much of a person's personality is inherited when you look at my family. My mother married my father in high school and had me whe she was 20, two years later she had my sister whom was concieved out of a one night/bad decision with an old friend, then she married my step-father and had my younger sister and brother. Even though we were all pretty much raised by my mother and step-father we all ended up with very different personalities and traits. Most people don't realize we are siblings.

 

[Monat]

As for the belief that a person can inherit a predisposition towards alcoholism, I don't think so. My father was an alcoholic, in fact he died when I was 2 years old in an drunk driving accident. His father and mother were alcoholics, and theirs were too and so on. But the chain was broken with me because I wasn't raised in an alcoholic household. I don't even like the taste of alcohol, and its not like I am just not given the chance to be an alcoholic, I'm in the Navy enough said.

 

[Feathers in Hair]

Monat, you bring up an interesting point. I sometimes wonder, though, if the predisposition to alchoholism is inherited but that it also serves a self-defeating purpose. (If that makes any sense... Not sure if it does, since it's late here, hehee!) For example, it seems to run quite strongly in my family that if members allow themselves to drink, they do so to excess. Because those who raised me saw this within our family, I wasn't interested in alchohol at an early age and never developed the taste for it. Sometimes I wonder if it's because, on some level, I don't want to allow myself to.

You always create the best threads, Jacquie! I'm not sure if any of my personality traits were handed down to me. As you say, we tend to learn them from our parents. FatMan touched upon this, and I tend to agree- some of my personality is built not out of similarity to the behavior of my parents, but as a reaction to it. I am chronically early, to use the example he uses, because I used to be embarased by being forced to be late. The aspects of my personality that I can appreciate sometimes also stem from unfortunate behavior on one of my parents' parts. I have a very strong aversion to conflict and am very quick to take on the 'peacemaker' role because this was something I used to be able to do in order to prevent unpleasantness from interactions with them and others.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

It helps to keep my conscience clear, to think I inherited the bad bits but learnt the Good.

But then I would wouldn't I.

 

[PureX]

As for the belief that a person can inherit a predisposition towards alcoholism, I don't think so. My father was an alcoholic, in fact he died when I was 2 years old in an drunk driving accident. His father and mother were alcoholics, and theirs were too and so on. But the chain was broken with me because I wasn't raised in an alcoholic household. I don't even like the taste of alcohol, and its not like I am just not given the chance to be an alcoholic, I'm in the Navy enough said.

No offense, but you are just one person. That doesn't make for much of a conclusive argument. Perhaps you simply didn't receive the genetic predisposition for alcoholism from your parents that your parents got from theirs.

As an alcoholic, myself, I am convinced by my own experiences, and by many discussions about this with other alcoholics, and non-alcoholics, that my brain reacts differently to alcohol than the brains of non-alcoholics. I experience a kind of blinding euphoria from drinking even a fairly small amount of alcohol that's so powerful that I have no certain way of controlling how much more I'll drink if I drink any alcohol at all. Non-alcoholics do not experience this euphoria, and they don't experience the kind of mental blindness that come with it, that renders an otherwise completely reasonable person incapable of making reasonable decisions regarding the use of alcohol. The difference is so stark, in fact, that most non-alcoholics can't grasp that this is a real condition going on within alcoholics. Yet over the years I have met and discussed alcoholism and how it works in literally thousands of people, and I hear the same anecdotal experiences over and over.

Some people's brains react to alcohol differently than other people's and I'm sure (and there are many studies to back me up) that this particular aspect of brain structure is often inherited from our genetic predicessors, though it often skips generations, too, for some reason.

Just as a side note, liking the taste of alcohol, or not, has nothing at all to do with whether a person becomes alcoholic. I didn't like the taste of alcohol, either, when I first drank it, yet I drank it to excess the very first time, got horribly sick and hung over, and still couldn't wait until I could get my hands on some more alcohol and do it all over again. That's how powerful the euphoric effect was on me, even at 10 or 11 years old. It wasn't the taste or smell or whatever of the alcohol that I so fell in love with, it was that euphoric effect that it had on my brain. It was being drunk, that I really wanted, not the alcohol, itself.

 

[Arabis]

I think that some personality traits are genetic and some are because of who you are around. I have a half-sister whom I did not meet until I was a teenager, and my whole life I was told how much I act like her. We don't look like each other at all. When I did finally meet her it was amazing at how much we were a like. We were also not raised by the same parents, she was raised by her mom and step-dad and I was raised by my mom and our dad in common.
Just looking at my kids and the things they do and say, their personality is so much of me and my husband that we don't teach them. For example my daughter is probably the pickiest eater in the world next to my husband. But he has not let her know that he is, we have been very careful to not ever let her see us pick at food or say that we don't like something and still she won't even try most things. I know kids are picky, but this was the only example I could explain well enough.
Anyway, I think that we learn a lot of attributes from our parents or who ever raised us, but there are a lot of genetic traits that are inherited that we don't know about too.

 

[jacquie4000]

I do think some traits are learned for instance my mother was a very quiet person. My father had a hot head and was the typical A type personality. After 30 years of marriage my mother started speaking out and getting like my father he argued so after so many years of it she started to act like him. The more you are around someone for prolonged periods you can pick up on things they do as well as your inherited traits.

 

[Scuba Pete]

Do you think our personalities are handed down through our parents?

Nature vs Nurture, eh?

I can't blame either: my personality is INSPIRED! Bwahahahahaha!

 

[jacquie4000]

Hmmm NetDoc You personality is inspired by what then?....lol let me guess those frigid morning dives you take?

 

[Scuba Pete]

You want me to assign blame? Who would accept the responsibility?

I believe the origin of my personality (and it's disorders) to be largely indeterminate. I am the only one responsible for who I am.

 

[jacquie4000]

Blame and Responsibility that could be a whole different thread.....lol But yes I agree you are responsible for who you are in your actions in life. But some of those actions are either learned or inherited.

 

[PureX]

I may not be responsible for the hand I've been given in life, but I AM responsible for what I do with it, or about it. I think of my alcoholism as if it were cancer. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't cause it, but now that it's part of me, I'm responsible for doing whatever I can to mitigate it.

 

[jacquie4000]

I

may not be responsible for the hand I've been given in life, but I AM responsible for what I do with it, or about it. I think of my alcoholism as if it were cancer. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't cause it, but now that it's part of me, I'm responsible for doing whatever I can to mitigate it.

Yes agreed. Alcoholism is in my family as well. And we are responsible for our actions yes.

 

[Scuba Pete]

I would use the word "influenced" rather than learned or inherited.

I have been influenced by my upbringing, but I have made choices either consciously or subconsciously to adopt or reject various behavior characteristics. I am not a slave to the environment that surrounds me.

Much the same can be said for my genetics. I am not the average of my mom and dad. I am unique, just like everyone else on this planet.

To be sure, one of the biggest cop outs used by jerks: "That's just the way I am!" We get that, now CHANGE your personality you dolt! In this respect, the tiger can change it's spots by making the decision to. The big decisions need to be accompanied by a host of tiny decisions, but they are possible.