Are Personality Types Born Or Made?

Back within the first year of the blog, I wrote an article on this subject, which I am returning to now. It’s not that our opinion has changed; I just feel I can do the subject a bit more justice.

People tend to bicker back and forth as to how one obtains their personality. Are we born into one set personality type? In other words, is our personality inherited? Or, are we born as a blank slate and molded into a specific type due to life experiences? Are we, essentially, forged in fire (or the lack thereof)? Allow me to share some thoughts with you on the matter. First, let’s define what we’re talking about.

Defining Personality

Personality type is not really about personality. I know that seems like a contradiction, but the reality of the matter is that what people refer when speaking about MBTI, the Jungian cognitive functions, the 16 types, etc. are not really “personality” types, even though we’ve come to call them that. It’s a misnomer. Ryan actually wrote an article on this subject which you can read here: Personality Type is Misnomer. However, in short, personality defines “the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.” Whereas, in comparison, what we at Practical Typing see as a more accurate description of these “personality types” is “mentalities,” which defines “the characteristic attitude of mind or way of thinking of a person or group.” When people talk about the 16 personality types, they’re referring to a system that defines how people think. To expand it beyond that puts it at risk of error, and is the reason why there are so many bad stereotypes.

Nature vs. Nurture

The logic behind the theory of nurture is that our life experiences mold us into a specific personality type. Logically, under this theory, one’s personality type can change. Of course, we see people claiming all the time that they were one of the 16 types as a children, and then eventually became another as an adult. We also see children emulate certain parents, whilst others children act specifically contrary to their parents, based on the strength or toxicity of their relationship.

Carl Jung speaks on this subject in his book “Psychological Types.” He spoke of how people refer to psychological adaptation as the reason why personalities vary. It can be an unconscious act, a struggle for existence. A mother can influence a child, resulting in the child unconsciously behaving a certain way.

This leads me straight into my first thought.

1. Children from the same family have distinct personality

In response to the aforementioned notion of a mother influencing the child, Carl Jung says this:

“This argument, while supported by incontestable evidence, becomes rather flimsy in face of the equally incontestable fact that two children of the same mother may exhibit contrary attitudes at an early age, though no change in the mother’s attitude can be demonstrated.”

Babies from the same family are distinct one from the other. A mother of multiple children will tell stories of how each baby was different than the other, even from birth. No child in one family ever seems to be carbon copy of another. In fact, each family tends to produce a range of personality types. Sometimes there seems to be a pattern, like a family of primarily Judgers, but there’s usually always that one lone Perceiver mixed in. I see people complaining all the time about being stuck in a family of all sensors as an intuitive, or a family of all intuitives as a sensor. So yes, that family formed a bunch of one specific dichotomy or perhaps cognitive function pair, but where did the odd one out come from? Why do some children choose to emulate one parent, while another child in the same family will emulate the second parent? Well…

2. Different personalities can adopt common attributes of another

As mentioned in the previous point, family groups as a whole tend to have a personality type, in a sense, or individual culture. I’ve walked into certain households and noticed how very P the household was, or maybe how very J the household was. Every family group seems to have a basic personality that has been somewhat implanted upon the children. I personally know a family that feels very FJ, and subsequently all of the children have picked up on Fe behavioral tendencies. However, only one out of the three children actually has Fe/Ti in their function stack, and the other two Fi/Te children just mimic the Fe learned behavior in an Fi/Te way. If experience determined personality type, then these two children should have ended up as Fe users. However, this is all learned behavior, and it frequently leads to mistypes.

Perhaps, on a surface level, many family members look similar, because the children have learned certain quirks or tendencies from their parents or each other. I’ve found that children specifically tend to emulate the parent that they relate to the most. Sometimes this’ll result in acting almost entirely like one parent, and others times it’ll be more scenario based, due to certain shared functions being drawn out by specific scenarios. However, they’ll all still tend to pick up on the overall culture of the family unit. But, usually, if you actually pay attention closely and get to know each person, you’ll find that sometimes it’s just mimicry, like an Fi user adopting Fe values, or a Te user dipping into his Fi in order to not provoke inconvenient drama. It’s about the reasoning behind the actions, not the actions themselves.

3. The theory of one’s personality type changing is typically based on a flawed understanding of the 16 types theory

This is why I defined personality above. “Personality” in it’s literal meaning can change, but one’s personality type (or mentality) does not. Now perhaps there are some extreme situations out there where someone’s mind breaks on a psychological level. However, when I see people saying that their personality changed, they’re usually saying things like “I was an INFP as a child, but then I became an INTJ. Typically, they’re talking about how they were a naive little child, and then some tragedy hit and they became jaded and cynical. Quite frankly, that understanding of personality type is insulting. It feeds into the idea that an INTJ must be critical and mean, and an INFP must be an eternal flower child. It’s based on stereotypes.

One’s way of thinking can contribute to certain behaviors or tendencies, but being jaded is not inherent in any type. Being a thinker does not make you jaded. It simply means that you prioritize a specific way of thinking, whether that be introverted thinking (Ti) or extraverted thinking (Te), over the reasoning of introverted feeling (Fi) or extraverted feeling (Fe). (Note: all judging functions, whether feeling or thinking, reason and possess a distinct style of logic.)

There are many versions of every personality type, many of which defy stereotypes. People just naturally develop over time, so temperaments and characteristics can change (which is more along the lines of the literal meaning of personality) but the way someone prefers to reason and the information they choose to utilize typically does not. Of course, the exception to this is the fact that we develop down our cognitive function stack, so an ISTP might be heavily Ti-Se at a young age, but then begin to demonstrate more Ni and Fe as they get older. It’s typically more of a supplemental thing, and those functions don’t tend to trump the original preferred way of reasoning (Ti-Se).

4. Genetics determines our appearance, so why not our way of thinking?

Every person is born with a specific genetic makeup which is inherited from their parents. We all know that kids usually look like a combination of their parents. However, even when they seem distinct from their father or mother, usually their appearance can be traced back to an aunt, an uncle, or a grandparent. Have you ever met that person who looked exactly like her great aunt? I have. All of our physical features can usually be found somewhere in our family line, assuming that information is available to us. Ultimately, we are just a seemingly random combination of the features in that predetermined genetic pool.

Personality types appear to operate in the same way. People love to point out how a kid takes after one (or both) of his parents. They’ll laugh and say how you’ve inherited your mother’s mischievous nature, or perhaps your father’s seriousness… etc. Some kids come out behaving exactly like one parent, while others are an obvious combination of the two.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, there are some children that appear to have completely unique personalities in comparison to the rest of their immediate family, and then end up being the odd balls of the family. This is probably where the theory comes from that someone’s inborn personality type is completely random. Those few odd ones out are basically just exclaiming “What the heck? How am I related to these people?” From what I’ve seen, there’s a distant relative out there somewhere that they take after; they just might not realize it.

For instance, my sister was the odd ball in my family. An ENTP (father) and an ISTP (mother) produced an ISTP (me), ENFP (brother), and INFP (sister). My brother makes sense, being an Ne dom like our father. Of course, I’m practically a clone of my mother so that was no mystery. However, we always joked about not knowing where my sister came from. But then as I got older, I started to realize that my sister is our grandmother, or perhaps our aunt on that same side of the family. It took a while because we rarely saw either of them, but as my sister got older and I matured enough to start paying attention to these things, I realized that she had a lot in common with people on that side of the family, and had all of the same basic behavioral tendencies.

In Closing, An Example I’ll Never Forget

I knew this guy once who found that he had a 16 year old son. The boy had wanted to get in touch with his biological father so after wearing down his mother, he reached out. To be clear, the father had never met his son prior to being 16 years old. I met the boy shortly thereafter because I knew his father… and the two were almost exactly the same. Literally. This boy had absolutely no prior connection to his father before this point, but their personalities were virtually identical. They looked the same. They acted the same. Situations like that just prove to me that it’s ultimately genetic.