Unit 1: Identity
Reading 1: Foreign objects
Name:………………………………………Class: ……………….. Groups:………….
Peer’s full name:……………………………………. Groups:………………..
PERSONALITIES
A 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.
B 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.
C 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.
D 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.
E 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.
F 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.
Exercise 1: Matching-Headings: Match the paragraph with the title and explain why you choose that paragraph for the
title. (list key words, key ideas…)
i A degree of control
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ii Where research has been carried out into the effects of family on personality
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iii Categorising personality features according to their origin
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iv A variety of reactions in similar situations
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v A link between personality and aspects of our lives that aren’t chosen
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vi A possible theory that cannot be true
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vii Measuring personality
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viii Different types of personality
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ix How our lives can reinforce our personalities
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x Potentially harmful effects of personality tests
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Exercise 2: Complete the structures about the passage above.
