How Early Does Your Personality Take Shape?

This week’s article summary is Clues to Your Personality Appear Before You Talk, and its focus is on research conducted on infants to assess to what extent early traits and behaviors remain in adulthood.

My guess is most of us feel there is a connection between the traits we demonstrated as infants and our personality as adults.

In the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, environment and experiences exert some influence in subsequent personality, yet based on the research studies in the article, our genes play a much more significant role.

One of my favorite books is Daniel Willingham’s A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. 

In one chapter on the 'nature v. nurture’ question Willingham discusses studies of identical twins separated at birth and growing up in different households and different environments. Often the twins, regardless of the household or environment, end up by having similar interests, outlook on life, etc. (including spouses who look alike). Willingham concludes that genetics influence how you see the world, how you interact with it, and what interests you pursue. So, while it’s incorrect to say that ‘genes are our destiny’, they do preprogram us to seek and favor certain experiences.

At my previous school—a preschool through eighth grade—the graduation ceremony included every 8th grader giving a short speech about how the school shaped him/her as a student and as a person. Not surprisingly some speeches were very short and straightforward while others were much more heartfelt and emotional. Invariably after the ceremony, 3s and PreK teachers would talk to me about how similar each graduate was to when they entered school at 3 or 4. There were some exceptions ("I would have never thought Jimmy could talk in front of hundreds of people!"), yet it was amazing how similar their personalities were at 3 and then 14. 

The importance of genetics does not mean we should take a fatalistic approach to life. Rather we as teachers work with students' unique (though somewhat hardwired) personalities in helping them grow and develop as students and as people.

Joe

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Your personality has been sculpted by many hands: Your genes, your friends, the schools you attended, plus many other factors all play a part in making you the person you are today.

But when exactly did your own distinct character first begin to take shape?

If you’re a shy person now, for instance, does that mean you were a shy child?

In all likelihood, yes. 

In fact, research suggests there are significant links between our behavioral tendencies when we’re just a few months old and our later personality. That isn’t to say that our personality was set in stone that early, but that the roots of who we are can be traced all the way back to our earliest days.

Psychologists who study babies usually refer to “temperament” rather than personality and one of the first ever investigations in this was the New York Longitudinal Study in the 1950s, which observed children from their birth up to age 30, as well as interviewing their parents.

Researchers concluded that there were nine different facets of infant temperament, including activity level, mood, and, distractibility. They noted that scores on different facets tended to cluster in three categories: “easy children”, “difficult children” and “slow to warm up” children.

The New York study found evidence that children categorized as easy or difficult at age three also tended to be categorized the same way in early adulthood.

Today the original nine aspects of temperament have been distilled into three broad dimensions: 

• Effortful Control which describes things like the infant’s self-control and ability to focus (resisting, for example, the lure of a tempting toy)
• Negative Affectivity, which refers to levels of negative emotion like fear and frustration
• Extraversion, which is to do with activity levels, excitement and being sociable

In a recent study parents rated their infants’ temperament on these dimensions when they were just a few months old (seven months, on average) and then rated their children’s personalities again an average of eight years later.

Infants who scored higher on the extraversion domain (they did things like smiled more) tended to score lower, at age eight, on the adult personality trait of neuroticism (that is, they were more emotionally stable); and those infants who scored higher on this study’s equivalent of effortful control went on to score higher on aspects of the adult trait of conscientiousness when they were children. 

If your baby seems to have a decent attention span – good news, this probably means they’ll keep their room tidy when they’re older.

Links even stretch across four decades. In another study researchers took measures of infancy temperament a little later, between the ages of 12 and 30 months, and found an association with personality traits in the same individuals when they were tested again 40 years later.

The two traits in question were toddler disinhibition (similar to the more widely used extraversion rating) and adult extraversion. That is, the more active and assertive the participants had been as toddlers, the more likely they were to score highly on extraversion as adults and on self-efficacy (our belief in our own abilities).

It’s worth remembering when reading about these findings that our personalities, although they show consistency through life, are also constantly evolving and it would be impossible to pinpoint any one moment when a person’s personality in their youth had taken on its adult form. However, as an infant grows into a small child, their personality is gradually crystallizing. Wait until a child is aged three, for example, and now their behavior will even more strongly foretell the adult personality.

Anyone who has young children of their own, or spends time with them, knows that it’s tempting to look for signs of emerging personality traits in a baby’s giggle or frown. The latest psychology research suggests such speculation might not be entirely in vain.

Researchers are also realizing that the roots of adult psychological problems may lie in behavioral tendencies that first appear in early childhood. By learning to recognize these signs, it might be possible to intervene carefully at an early age and to help steer children on the path to a healthier future.