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"We are all familiar with the idea that different people have different personalities, but what does this actually mean? It means that different people behave in different ways but it must be more than that. After all, different people find themselves in different circumstances, and much of their behaviour follows from this fact. However, our common experience reveals that different people respond in quite remarkably different ways even when faced with roughly the same circumstances. Alan might be happy to live alone in a quiet and orderly cottage, go out once a week, and stay in the same job for thirty years, whilst Beth likes nothing better an exotic travel and being surrounded by vivacious friends and loud music."

• A possible theory that cannot be true 

• How our lives can reinforce our personalities

• Measuring personality

• A variety of reactions in similar situations

"In cases like these, we feel that it cannot be just the situation which is producing the differences in behaviour. Something about the way the person is ‘wired up’ seems to be at work, determining how they react to situations, and, more than that, the kind of situations they get themselves into in the first place. This is why personality seems to become stronger as we get older; when we are young, our situation reflects external factors such as the social and family environment we were born into. As we grow older, we are more and more affected by the consequences of our own choices (doing jobs that we were drawn to, surrounded by people like us whom we have sought out). Thus, personality differences that might have been very slight at birth become dramatic in later adulthood."

• A link between personality and aspects of our lives that aren’t chosen

• How our lives can reinforce our personalities

• Categorising personality features according to their origin

• A degree of control

Personality, then, seems to be the set of enduring and stable dispositions that characterise a person. These dispositions come partly from the expression of inherent features of the nervous system, and partly from learning. Researchers sometimes distinguish between temperament, which refers exclusively to characteristics that are inborn or directly caused by biological factors, and personality, which also includes social and cultural learning. Nervousness, for example, might be a factor of temperament, but religious piety is an aspect of personality.

• Categorising personality features according to their origin

• A link between personality and aspects of our lives that aren’t chosen

• Where research has been carried out into the effects of family on personality

• Different types of personality

The discovery that temperamental differences are real is one of the major findings of contemporary psychology. It could easily have been the case that there were no intrinsic differences between people in temperament, so that given the same learning history, the same dilemmas, they would all respond in much the same way. Yet we now know that this is not the case.

• Measuring personality

• A variety of reactions in similar situations

• Potentially harmful effects of personality tests

• A possible theory that cannot be true 

Personality measures turn out to be good predictors of your health, how happy you typically are – even your taste in paintings. Personality is a much better predictor of these things than social class or age. The origin of these differences is in part innate. That is to say, when people are adopted at birth and brought up by new families, their personalities are more similar to those of their blood relatives than to the ones they grew up with.

• Where research has been carried out into the effects of family on personality

• Categorising personality features according to their origin

• A link between personality and aspects of our lives that aren’t chosen

• How our lives can reinforce our personalities

Personality differences tend to manifest themselves through the quick, gut-feeling, intuitive and emotional systems of the human mind. The slower, rational, deliberate systems show less variation in output from person to person. Deliberate rational strategies can be used to override intuitive patterns of response, and this is how people wishing to change their personalities or feelings have to go about it. As human beings, we have the unique ability to look in at our personality from the outside and decide what we want to do with it.

• A possible theory that cannot be true 

• A degree of control

• Measuring personality

• How our lives can reinforce our personalities