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Study Says Your Personality Doesn't Change After 1st Grade
A study authored by Christopher Nave, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, says that our personalities stay pretty much the same from early childhood all the way through old age. From the article: "Using data from a 1960s study of approximately 2,400 ethnically diverse schoolchildren (grades 1 - 6) in Hawaii, researchers compared teacher personality ratings of the students with videotaped interviews of 144 of those individuals 40 years later. They examined four personality attributes - talkativeness (called verbal fluency), adaptability (cope well with new situations), impulsiveness and self-minimizing behavior (essentially being humble to the point of minimizing one's importance)." This must explain my overriding need to be first captain when we pick kickball teams at the office.
Yes and no. Yes, it does not change, in fact it does not change since your first day, simply because your DNA is already setup, and ready to go. And NO, it does change, if you are willing to learn.
took acid later in life?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I still pull girls hair and play with my wiener.
In 1st grade... I was quiet and geeky.
10 years later... I'm still quiet and geeky.
Damnit.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Hawaii, yeah that's a pretty typical place, I'm sure it being studied in Hawaii won't skew the results.
It probably won't because the results sound right, but still, in the interest of science, I would have been more satisfied if they would have done the study in more than one area of the country/world.
I was also annoyed by my 1st grade teacher not teaching us the Cyrillic and Japanese alphabet as well as the Latin one.
Only if personality were set at conception. This is saying that personality is set well after first grade. The personality formed by that stage of life could be due to nurture or nature. It's only nature that makes it stick after it's been set. .02 cents.
Just my
I distinctly remember my Second Grade class and how much I preferred to be alone. We had group reading assignments but I didn't enjoy them, nor did I enjoy many other group activities. In Fifth grade I had a psychological assessment (for Gifted/Advanced students, but I was nothing special). The report, which I read many years later, said that I was quiet, quite shy, but had exceptional command of language, and so on. This was before autism was readily diagnosed, and I suspect that had I been tested 15 years later, I would be labeled mildy autistic.
In college, though I was involved in many groups, I still preferred to run off by myself. Fast forward 20 years and it's still the same. I'm involved in a sports team, clubs, etc., but it's almost as if I'm pretending. I do the team activities, give talks, am involved in film making (one of the most extroverted activities I can imagine). People tell me that I am a great speaker and they feel that I relate well, but even to this day I approach conversations in a methodical way: listen, confirm understanding, ask questions, repeat. This pretense is precisely because I enjoy being alone and I found it much easier to pretend to be well-adjusted and sociable than to just tell everyone how I really felt.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been waiting for somebody to answer the age-old question:
Were you born an a-hole or did you work on it your whole life?
I tend to agree as well, I've gone through massive swings in personality and interest over the years. It took a lot of work, but I am very different than I was back then. There probably is an element of truth in that inertia is likely set by that point. In that one tends to have to fight if one doesn't want to be type cast permanently. There's a lot of reinforcement that goes on and a lot of pressure not to rock the boat by changing.
Not every first grader has a $70,000 allowance.
OTOH, this may explain Charlie Sheen.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hasn't anyone besides me seen the 7-UP series?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
"I was an extreme introvert...I'm meeting plenty of random people all the time"
Wait? How does this disprove or prove your introversion and or change to extroversion?
People think not being around others is introversion...and it isn't. It is where do you get your energy from. An extrovert will find energy by being around people in ANY activity...not just ones that are hand chosen. An introvert generally has to be in their comfort zone before they can deal with others...they are able to gain more energy from their comfort zone that they may now expend on being around others.
I am a HUGE introvert...and I was a stage performing / touring musician for years. Being an introvert, it make aquiring people skills a little harder, but I made them...and when I did I was able to seem very outgoing under certain circumstances.
BTW -- the sports you list? Very introvert friendly...they are all about being able to focus on you internally, and less about the external.
That said, personality generally is set early on...but people can make a concerted effort (or even a situational one) and change with time. If you were in one of my grad courses, my profs would have used you as an example of not knowing what introversion and extroversion are...then again, unless you are in the field, I wouldn't expect someone to require in depth knowledge (and yeah, the standard def is pretty accurate for 90% of what people use it for).
The point might be that - your behaviour at 40 is the same as your behaviour at 5. The in between stages are not considered - since people do change a lot through the years. But in the end, you mostly reach your behaviour back at 5.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Your wife may not have changed at all. It may be just that her environment changed, and thus her completely consistent reactions to the new environment makes it look like she changed.
I am going to make a big assumption here, so please excuse me if I am wrong. I assume that your wife was previously fat. REALLY fat. I will also assume that she lost a HUGE amount of weight from that operation.
There is a common misconception that women are 'natural nurturers'. This isn't the case. Women (like men) have a tendency to be self serving. Making things about them. It is extremely common for that self serving attitude to be confused with being nurturing. This happens because women are generally given higher social status if they are 'good mothers' than if they are not. People look for all sorts of way to get personal gain. Frequently that gain is social status.
The more attractive a woman is, the more attention she will receive from men. The more money and goods that will be given to her, and all around the easier it will be for her to find things other than her kids to fulfill her sociopathic tendencies.
I don't know your wife, so I cannot say whether this is really true of her or not, but having a woman who goes from fat and centered on her kids to skinny and ignoring them fits plenty well in the hypothesis presented in the summary.
Temperament doesn't change; that is, your basic innate tendency to react one way or another. However, personality is more than just temperament; it also includes emotional scars, life lessons, and the results of concerted effort to control your innate tendencies.
Basically, a naturally timid individual will never become a natural daredevil --though s/he might learn to fake it very well. In fact, sometimes people learn to fake it so well that they even manage to fool themselves, with the truth only revealed once the constant strain of impulse-denial and self-deception finally gets the better of them.
But it's also possible to truly moderate one's responses, given the right life experiences and lots of hard work. It's not a matter of becoming the opposite of what you are, more of learning to rein in your natural responses when possible, and to compensate for what can't be controlled. You may not ever become, say, more extroverted than Mr. Popularity, but you can still make strides toward the middle of the spectrum, sometimes enough to make your old self seem like a completely different person.
And for the vast majority of those people, all you ever had in common with them was that you were forced to occupy the same physical structure for 7 hours every day.
The fact that you went to the same high school often (although maybe not always) indicates that you share at least a socioeconomic background and a cultural background (e.g., middle class kids go to public school, rich kids go to private school). The fact that you were in the same building also probably meant that you lived in the same neighborhood, knew the same people, etc. But after high school, most of those ties are at least at risk.
I have known many women that followed that same path. They were generally sociopaths when they are young, and wanted the baby for selfish reasons. Some of them skip the bible thumping stage, but that seems to be a 50/50 mix. Just count yourself lucky. A sociopath ex-wife that ignores their kids is DRAMATICALLY better for you and your kids than a sociopath parent that sees personal benefit in using the kids.