How People are Different? – Personality & Psychology
Most people have no clue just how much we can differ from each other. The ignorance and arrogance of this subject is somewhat disturbing, and a little scary.
People love to judge others. However, most of the time, these judgments are very basic and shallow. They have very little understanding of anything that they are talking about. These judgments and opinions are reinforced by others that are equally as ignorant as they are. Their ignorance perpetuates their arrogance. This is absolutely the Dunning Kruger Effect.
Different Personalities
Most people have absolutely no clue, and no understanding or just how people can differ in a personality sense. They have no idea about the range of personality traits that there are, and how those traits affect a person’s motivations.
There are many personality models. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is a popular model, but it’s not main stream psychology. The Big Five Personality Traits is considered main stream psychology, and it provides more useful and flexible results.
Most people have heard of the most common personality dimension. This is the introvert/extrovert dimension. However, most don’t know what it really means to be an introvert or extrovert. They have just a shallow, and probably mostly wrong, understanding of this dimension.
Intelligence
Most people also have a very limited understanding of what intelligence is. Again, people’s views on this are influenced by ignorant, commonly believed beliefs. It’s usually a simple judgement that focuses on processing speed, and neglects depth and comprehension. They also neglect how things like personality, interest, and learning difficulties can affect a person’s performance and achievement.
Many people believe that being social is connected to intelligence. In the animal kingdom, the more social animals do tend to be the more intelligent ones. However, when it comes to humans, highly intelligent people often seek out solitude. There are a few reasons for this, intelligent deep thinkers need alone time so that they can think. Another reason is, highly intelligent people will be a minority, and they may struggle to relate to the majority. If the majority just wants to engage in small talk and banter, and they want to talk about more important and complex issues, they won’t be satisfied.
The vast majority can’t tell the difference between those who are smarter than the average, and the very small minority that are genius level smart. Such as the great thinkers and writers of the past like Nietzsche, and Carl Jung.
Nature vs Nurture
People can differ due to biological (nature) reasons, and learned behaviours and cultural factors (nurture). Children that grow up in the same families can still have drastically different personalities despite going to the same school, roughly being the same age, and generally having similar life experiences. The only thing that can really account for this is different genetic developments, or variability.
People are also subject to programming, so, learned behaviours and cultural influences will also play a factor as well. So, how we are different is a mixture of both that biology that we are given, and social and cultural influences.
