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Or do personalities develop later?
RebYidd23: If you’re a parent, you should know the answer.
Look up nature vs.nurture controversy. Most psychologists feel that your personality is 50 % of each factor.
The Gemara (Shabbat 156a-b) says that personality traits are set at birth. However, a person has a choice as to how to express these traits.
According to the Gemara people get them at birth. However, it would seem that personality types as abstractions already exist.
Yes.There are 16 personality types
If you have any friends who are parents, you can see how kids from the same family can have very different personalities from the time they are babies. And while nurture starts from the time a kid is born, and even within the same family, the parents may unconsciously relate to different babies differently, it seems likely that some of the differences were there from birth.
I don’t know what percentage is nature and which is nurture, and I’m not sure that its possible for anyone to know. I’m sure that there have been many studies done, but I don’t put that much trust in studies. It’s nearly impossible to do a flawless study.
And I think this topic is one which it would be pretty impossible to prove one way or another. Part of the reason for this is that nature probably contributes greatly to nurture in very subtle ways that we are not even aware of. The two things are very connected and influence each other a lot, and it is hard to know which is influencing the other.
They have done “twin studies”. Where they look at identical twins that were separated at birth and see how they turn out. I saw one that said both ended up being firemen and had s dog with the same name.or something there were lots of similarities in their lives. There is nature and nurture and bachira that all play a role.
I know they do twin studies. My point was that I don’t know if such studies are completely fool-proof.
They do seem to indicate that nature plays a big role.I have seen things about how they often marry people with the same name or give their kids the same name. Which is rather interesting.
However, I am skeptical of studies. There may be a lot of bias involved. For example, maybe the people performing this study wanted to prove that being gay is genetic, so they found a way to do the study in such a way that it would “prove” what they wanted it to prove.
I do agree though that nature and nurture and bechira all play a major role.
According to the Derech Hashem by the Ramchal, there are several sources for personality. They can inherit middos from their parents, they are affected by their mazel, Hashem endows certain middos according to His plan, a person is affected by his experiences growing up (chinuch), and lastly, a person has bechirah to choose how he acts (within certain parameters).
motchah – thanks for bringing a source!
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