Born with a personality?

There may be as many personalities as there are, germs, animals, viruses, bugs, universes, people, trees, dreams, plants, photons, rocks, etc., relatively speaking.

In as much as a germ is born with certain characteristics humans are as well. The human infrastucture is determinantal. Nothing is a blank slate not even a blank slate.

mark

Yes, babies are born with personalities which can perhaps be modified by experience. I don't know how many types there are, probably depends on who's counting what.

This is my response as well.

If you ever have the opportunity to visit a hospital nursery, you will see vast personality differences among neonates. Some will startle more easily, some are cranky and crying all the time, others are placid.

Where it gets complicated, is when people begin to relate differentially to the babies with various personalities.

Any parent with any time to look and more than one child will tell you that children are born with a personality!

An Italian psychiatrist has been doing extensive ultra-sound observations of babies in utero and following them upfor a time post-birth.

Levels of activity, characteristic gestures, sleepiness, "crankiness" etc remain constant before and after birth.

Having read some translations of original descriptions by this woman of her team's work, I have some concerns about her methodology, but the work is interesting nonetheless.

Once they are born, it begins to become more difficult to separate from nature from nurture - as life becomes more and more a huge lottery (though the lottery begins, in fact, before conception!), but I do believe we enter the world outside the womb with some of our numbers already in place in regards to personality.

"Nothing is a blank slate--not even a blank slate"....Love that.

My way of marking

I doubt there are only 16 types of personalities, though I guess it depends on how you quantify them. Like you could say there are only two types -- basically optimistic, basically pessimistic. Etc. I don't think that sort of quantifying is necessarily useful.

But inherent personality/ temperment -- hoo yeah.

I happen to know 17 people, and I can state without doubt that there are more than 16 personalities. No two of these people seem to have the same personality.

It could be that there are just 17 types of personailities and if I meet more people, they will just repeat.

I will let you know when I meet more people... but I doubt is is ever very useful trying to categorize something as diverse and ill-defined as personality.

agreed, ebrown.

Do you mean the Myers-Briggs thing?
I think we have common traits, extroverted-introverted ect. but, these are just generalities. Personality is as unique as the person. We all have similar experiences ie. school, country, language but beyond that there are so many variables. I know several sets of twins, rarely do they have the same personalities.

truth
EBrown, there are people who make a living constructing TYPES of personality: personality theorists. But we must remember that these "types" or classes of personality are construed not on the basis of the complete similarity of units placed into them. There are no identities in nature. Everything is concretely unique; classes are abstractions which group things together on the basis of SOME similarities thought to be significant, and the differences are treated as "noise."
It is my impression that babies in a nursery have primitive personalities, or proto personalities. Surely, all of them will become VERY different--aside from some physiologically based temperamental traits--when they grow up. Their personality evolutions will be the result of experiences, even though they will have a physiological foundation upon which those experiences work. SO, I guess I'm guessing that personalilty is the result of both nature and nurture.

We have three children, two boys and a girl. It's hard to tell pictures of them apart up to about 18 months (none of them were much in the hair department while young), but their personalities were different and distinct nearly from birth.

We were all together again over this past Christmas break. It stretches the imagination they're from the same family now (they're 20, 18 and 15).

I think everyone watches a newborn and records its every move and calls it a "personality". People like to think this about their babies, but there's really no way to know. People have different experiences, and any difference could just as easily have been caused by something else.

It's more than that, rufio. A great book on the subject is "The Scientist in the Crib" by Alison Gopnik et al. I highly recommend it.

Did the author's have children? To really be a scientist, one must be objective....

Or do scientific studies... ya know, double-blind, that sort of thing.

Yes, but when studying personality, I don't question the method of experiment so much as the process of interpretation once you get the "data" back. No one's ever been able to objectively measure personality in adults, I don't see how they could have done it any better with babies, who are noticibly less available for comment.

Well, read the book and find out.

Just because you don't see it does not make it impossible. At all.