We want to talk about our personality and this idea of nature versus nurture. Personality is the combination of traits or qualities that make a person unique. We want to talk about things like culture. Culture is who we are.
We have these smaller subsets of culture called co-culture. These are the groups that we belong to. Dog owner.
Dog not owner. Cat owner. Not a cat person. On time. Not on time.
religion, or that idea of where do you stand on ethics. All of these co-cultures come together to make us uniquely us. Well, our personality is this combination of these traits and qualities, and we're all very different, even when we have a lot of similarities. With nature versus nurture, we really look at how many things are influenced with what I was born with, and how many things are the communities and cultures I surround myself with. creating who I am, right?
So nature tends to be that idea of genetic factors. So in the picture on the left, it says things like eye color, hair color, blood type. On the right, we have nurture and environmental factors. So things like my weight, or I have an autoimmune disease, that's something that is environmental, something that I grew over time. Those things are nurture instead of nature, and separating those out can really help us.
When we look at how temperament and personality affect us, we really want to look at a couple things. Temperament is a genetic predisposition causing an individual to behave, react, or think a certain way. Now, whether or not we've known it or not, temperament really is biologically determined. It is that version of nature. So our temperament really comes from our genetics.
So these are characteristics that we had from childhood. We can observe those similar traits in animals. So things like, are you quick-tempered?
Are you really patient? Are you calm? Are you full of anxiety?
A lot of those things really are in that category of temperament, right? Then when we get to personality, that's really the things that are products of our social environments. What helped shape us?
Have you ever spent time with a group of people and you realize that you had similar ways of speaking, similar patterns of organization? And we realize that, oh gosh, this is something that I've picked up over time from the people that I surround myself. And a lot of these personality traits really are humanistic. We don't see those same versions of traits in other animals. And we really look at this about what kind of behaviors do we have in exhibit.
When you talk about personality, we have the big five. Now there's the ocean model, which I'll go through as well. But the big five is the one we tend to spend the most time on.
So surgency, agreeableness, dependability, emotional stability, and culture. And what is stated by the big five is essentially that all five things come together to make us uniquely ourselves. So how agreeable are you?
Can people depend on you? Emotional stability can vary contextually, relationally, situationally. Culture. Remember, culture is our experiences. Culture is our lived experience and how we pick certain things up and it becomes part of our personality or it doesn't based on our in-group or out-group membership.
The ocean model of personality, it's similar but to the a little different. How open you are. how conscientious you are, so how much you're critically thinking about and having that mindfulness.
How extroverted you are, that means how outgoing you are. Please understand, introverts, when we pit introvert versus extrovert, we start to do something that's really harmful to us. Introverts tend to be people who spend a lot of energy with people. So I'm an extroverted introvert.
I can be out and I can be... loud and in the crowd, but it's energy depleting for me. A true extrovert gets energy out of being around a lot of people. So this isn't meant to curse people.
Oh, you're extroverted. Oh, you're introverted. It's how much do we tend to be more extroverted or introverted in different contexts, in different relationships, and in different cultures?
How agreeable are we? Neuroticism tends to also be another one that's misunderstood. Are you full of anxiety? Do you bite your nails?
You tend to fidget with things. We might have a little bit of neuroticism. Just some things that are really preventing us from being able to fully be ourselves.
Then we get to emotional intelligence. And here there are four things. Please know them. There are four ways that we have and experience emotions that help us to make the idea of emotional intelligence. So we start by we perceive our emotions.
Now, this is really difficult. We're going to have a chapter on emotions and talk. about this a lot, but some of us struggle with alexithymia, where we don't have the word for the emotion we're experiencing.
Sometimes we lack that, and that's not on you. That's just a way that we define this. We're able to perceive our emotions, then we're able to understand them.
If I can understand my emotions and I know why that they're there, I can manage them and use them in a way that's productive for me. That's pro-social. That's going to help with my relationships. It's going to help me attain my goals.
And then, therefore, I know how to use my emotions in a way that helped me to achieve what I want and get to that self-actualization. So with emotional intelligence, which we also call EQ, all four of these work in tandem together for us. And that's how we achieve that self-actualization.
We have different communication skills. So we call these communication dispositions or general patterns of communication behavior. So we talked about that idea of introversion versus extroversion. We have avoidance traits. So some of us are open and I'm not going to avoid anything.
I'm really that person that's going to get in it. And then sometimes where I don't want anything to do with this, we have this reticence or shyness. We might be communication apprehended. which means I don't always want to engage.
Sometimes I hold back a little bit and that can come from a lot of things. It can be completely appropriate, of course. And some of us just don't want to communicate as much.
Some of us are more people watchers. I'd rather listen and see what happens than be the one to speak first or have nonverbal behaviors that say that I'm engaged. And again, this is not a condemnation of self.
It's the idea of us just exploring who we are in our self-concept. How argumentative are we? Argumentativeness tends to be seen as negative, but really we're just fighting for our perspectives and our point of view. That's not negative unless we turn it into verbal aggressiveness.
That is negative. When we take our opinions and we start asserting them as truths to other people without allowing people to speak for themselves and having their own thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. We have this socio-communicative orientation, which is how responsive, assertive, and versatile we are. So all of these things come together, and these are our different skill sets. And again, we're going to vary contextually, relationally, culturally.
All of these things are going to affect where we are.