Question It seems philosophy is about one's relationship with the world... yet, there is no category of "Relationships" presented by AskPhilosophers. Perhaps it's too broad a category? Perhaps the right category for the following question is "Personality"... but that's not on the list either. It seems that personalities shift as part of a relationship. Behaviors that wouldn't have ever been displayed not only present themselves but seem to be part of a persona and then are viewed as part of one's personality. How do we know the true nature of one's personality?

Accepted:
March 13, 2006

Comments

There is a lot of debate among philosophers right now as to whether our common sense view of "personality" is accurate. We tend to think of ourselves and of others as having stable psychological characteristics that underlie and explain our behavior in a large range of diverse circumstances. But there’s an increasing body of evidence from social psychology that suggests that a great deal of our behavioral responses depend heavily on what situation we’re in. For example, a study of students at the Princeton Theological Seminary showed that the likelihood of a student’s stopping to help an apparently injured person was strongly depended heavily on whether the student had been advised that he or she was running late for the next phase of the experiment.

So what may appear to be "uncharacteristic" behavior on the part of some individual may simply be the result of the individual’s being in an "uncharacteristic" situation. And certainly the people one interacts with are important determinants of a situation. We all behave slightly (or maybe enormously) differently depending on whether we are in the company of strangers or close friends, and many of us have different "styles of relating" with different friends. It shouldn’t be surprising then that new relationships evoke new behavior. Different senses of humor, different conversational rhythms, different interests – why shouldn’t such factors call forth different responses from us? And of course, our responses will in turn modify those of the people with whom we are interacting.

What do we say, in light of all this, about "personality"? Probably that it’s not a terribly useful concept, and that it won’t be possible to develop any principled basis for saying when an individual’s personality has changed. We can often predict reasonably well, on the basis of past experience, how an individual will behave in familiar circumstances, with familiar people. But we’re on much shakier ground when we try to extrapolate from the familiar circumstances to novel situations. If the notion of "personality" makes any sense at all, it would designate a complex psychological disposition – a kind of function from situation to behavior. On this way of looking at things, we can allow that there are inherent individual differences – we don’t all respond exactly the same way to the same situation – even while acknowledging that learning how someone behaves in one situation may not tell us very much about how he or she will behave in another. So there wouldn’t be such a thing as being "outgoing" simpliciter, just "outgoing-at-parties/shy-in-public-speaking/neutral-at-family-gatherings" And there wouldn’t be "crude" but rather "crude-with-Bob-and-Dick/sensitive-with-Amy."

For a comprehensive and sensitive discussion of all these issues, see Lack of Character by John Doris.