Psychology Facts About Personality

To better understand this, let’s remember that people are more emotional than rational beings, always calculating first whether they will be emotionally satisfied. If they get more than they give, people are usually emotionally satisfied.

9 Psychology Facts About Personality You Should Know

Understanding these 9 facts about personality allows you to effectively manage people and your interactions with them. It also helps you to stop taking their behavior personally and become more resilient to it.

Overall, this blog post aims to inform and enhance your life, not to condemn or provoke anger. It’s crucial to understand that there is no judgment here. Blaming people for their nature would be as absurd as condemning a frog for jumping or a cat for meowing.

And so let’s start by presenting some psychological facts about human nature (more precisely, facts that are of a psychological, genetic, and evolutionary nature).

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 1:

People Do Things Solely for Themselves

Even though you may think that someone’s life at least partially revolves around you, except for your parents, people think about you only in the context of “How can I get what I need through this person?”

What people want from you can be anything: friendship, love, affection, presence, financial help, advice, the reputation you bring, recognition, acceptance, family, gifts, and everything else.

You remain in their lives if they see they can gain something from you. If they don’t see your purpose and reject you, it’s purely because they’ve calculated the cost and benefits and assessed that they would lose more than gain. They rarely go beyond this.

For instance, if a girl is looking for a boyfriend, she will quickly evaluate whether the guy is what she wants and how much energy and time she needs to invest in him. If the investment doesn’t align with the benefit, for example, “I’ll have to make an effort for this guy, and I’ll get nothing special in return,” she will give up. This isn’t because the guy is terrible. He just doesn’t fulfill her needs, making her investment pointless.

When we talk about investment, we refer to time, energy, effort, money, emotions, feelings, and everything else that can be invested in someone.

This obviously applies not only to love relationships but also to all other relationships, including relationships with the closest family. Not to mention with friends.

If, however, the offer is cheap: “You will give me a lot, and I can give you little or nothing in return,” people will keep you in their lives because it’s convenient to have you around.

To better understand this, let’s remember that people are more emotional than rational beings, always calculating first whether they will be emotionally satisfied. If they get more than they give, people are usually emotionally satisfied.

In this way, you can be a part of their life. You just have to give them what they want.

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 2:

People Have Aggression in Themselves

Each of us carries some amount of aggression within. Ask Freud and Carl Jung.

Aggression is simply a part of human nature and manifests itself in different ways. Aggression does not mean that someone will hit you or yell at you. It can be expressed much more subtly.

You know enough about open aggression that we won’t talk much about it, except to say that it’s an immature mechanism called acting out, which is more suitable for younger people and children. Adults should and can behave more maturely.

Some people don’t appear aggressive, making you think what I said isn’t true. In reality, due to numerous neuroses and fears that shaped their character, they don’t dare to show their aggression openly and instead display it passively. These people lack the courage to confront someone directly, perhaps fearing they will lose that person or scared of the consequences of expressing their opinion directly.

It’s less important whether their aggression comes from the injuries they’ve suffered or if it’s their nature; the essence is that they perform small acts of passive aggression. They make snide remarks, set traps, comment in a way that undermines someone and raises doubt, and create situations where, even if they can’t harm someone directly because they lack the courage, that person hurts themselves.

Here’s an example of passive aggression:

A friend’s comment, “I could never be with such a man,” referring to your suitor. And if the person listens and accepts that suggestion, she (the friend) has achieved her intention, and she hasn’t put much effort into it.

Passive aggression is actually more dangerous than active aggression because you can see the active one and choose to either leave or stay. You can’t see passive aggression; they can feed it to you your whole life, secretly destroying it. Passive aggression is like bedbugs on the walls of a house. When you realize what’s happening, the house has irreversibly collapsed.

The third form of aggression is reserved for the most fearful people, who don’t even dare to deal with others, not even passively. They turn their aggression inward and punish themselves for others’ actions. In this case, the aggression is directed towards themselves. This is a sad group, rarely considering that others are guilty and sometimes deserve punishment. They automatically feel the need to punish themselves for others’ deeds. I’ll write more about this in future posts, as it deserves a separate article.

Regarding aggression in people, I’ll add that most people use all three forms of aggression, depending on the situation and the person.

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 3:

People Are Hurt

Each and every one of them.

At a young age, they may experience hurt from their parents, friends at school, and girls and boys during adolescence. Not to mention the various others: friends, family, acquaintances, and authorities. We also have random passersby (whom most people claim not to care about yet spend days, weeks, and months thinking about what they said or did to them).

Let’s follow the simple logic of this statement: Everyone is aggressive, as I mentioned, so which means that practically everyone “damages” everyone.

Someone might hurt you just because they’re defending themselves. I’ll explain this because it’s stranger than being hurt on purpose.

Injuries lead to wounds, and some of these wounds never heal. If something you do or might do can hurt them, they’d rather avoid you or attack you than allow those wounds to reopen.

From there, emotionally unavailable people emerge—those who turn all relationships into non-committal ones (lacking profound emotional connections).

They turn everything into humor, keep relationships superficial, or claim they don’t need anyone. They become people who push others away. The goal is not to let anyone close to you so that they don’t get hurt in a similar way as before.

Once again, people are hurt, and you don’t know where their wounds come from or how deep they are. If your reaction aligns with their wounds or they merely think it might, you’ll suffer in their world. They’ll reject you if they’re more fearful by nature or hurt you if they’re more aggressive by nature.

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 4:

People Are Selfish – And That’s Natural

They will always grab for themselves. It’s the law of survival.

They will always take what they need the most—emotions, money, companionship, conversations, or anything else. No matter what it is, what they take for themselves is not essential. What matters is knowing that people are primarily quite selfish beings.

This starts in childhood because baby doesn’t care whether mom slept or not. It wants what it needs. We practice selfishness from a very young age because we need it to survive.

It’s also important to know that they won’t consider you too much. If they need something from you, they’ll focus intensely on getting it, and there’s almost no mechanism for them to say, “Wait, let’s see what you need.”

Unconscious Minds Drive People

What we picked up as good or bad in childhood—what we adopted, what we’re not even aware of—guides us much more than our rational and conscious mind. As helpful as it would be to start with common sense, it’s practically impossible because the conscious mind isn’t in control.

In much more detail on this topic: Conscious and Unconscious Mind

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 6:

People Are the Same In All Relationships

It is possible that you think that other people have a better experience with the same person with whom you had a very bad experience. For example, you might believe that your partner’s new love will be happier with them and fare better because they will treat them differently. But things are not like that.

We have one nature and always express it the same way toward people. Only some people tolerate this behavior better.

For instance, if your ex partner was grumpy, causing fights, and now they have found a new partner and you’re jealous because everything seems to be blooming there, you don’t have to be. Sooner or later, they’ll start grumbling to them, and they’ll be exactly the same as with you. The only difference may be how that new person tolerates it.

And keep in mind: If you could handle your partner’s character better, you could still be together. The point is that people are always the same, and they don’t have three or eight characters. You shouldn’t delude yourself with fantasies that you’ve had the worst experience with them and someone else will have a different/better experience. Everyone will get the same treatment; some just stand it better.

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 7:

People Will conduct Life Experiments On You

Very often, you’ll serve as an experimental bunny.

Some do it because they’re malicious and curious about how you’ll react and how a particular situation will end for you. Others experiment with you for benign reasons—to appear better than you. If you’re now wondering how these reasons can be benign, go back to that story about selfishness.

Let me explain. For example, if someone convinces you to break up with your boyfriend, it’s often because they want you to be the first to break up and see how it ends. The idea is that they can follow your example after you, especially if it turns out well for you. Also, to avoid doing something they talked you into if it didn’t work out well for you. From this, they obviously get a double benefit: now they’re finally better than you—something related to the hierarchies we all live in.

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 8:

Nothing Happens by Chance, Because People Make Decisions

People decide how to behave, even those for whom you find countless justifications for their actions.

When we like someone (this applies to friends, family, and business associates as well, but let’s focus on relationships for a moment), we’ll invent thousands of reasons why they did this or that.
They didn’t contact me because their phone ran out of battery and because their sick grandmother kept them at home.

In reality, the truth is that he didn’t contact you because he made the decision not to, and this changes the perspective. Because when you think that something is happening to someone spontaneously, there’s a lot of room for maneuvering and different interpretations. They love me, but they didn’t have time. They didn’t mean it that way. It doesn’t happen to them often. It’s because of their parents. That’s their nature…

However, when we accept that people make decisions, then that’s it. Game over.

We have to face the truth that a person has decided to do something that we might not like. To yell at us, not to call us, to hurt us, to reject us. And as unpleasant as this prospect is, it’s actually very pleasant in the sense that you have fewer dilemmas about people.

In front of you is what it is: someone has decided to be what they are, and at least you see them honestly for who they are. Realistically, they would have made a different decision if they wanted it differently.

Psychology Facts About Personality No. 9:

People Are Always Right

Even when they are wrong, they still try to be right.

This is where ego-defense mechanisms come into play. If you’ve never heard of them, their role is to protect oneself (the self) and one’s self-esteem.

Let me clarify through two interesting mechanisms: rationalization and denial. A good example of rationalization can be found in Aesop’s fable about the fox and the sour grapes (today, the expression ‘sour grapes’ is used when someone desires something but can’t have it). That’s precisely my rationalization: I didn’t want it anyway. I don’t need it. I didn’t do it because…

The idea behind rationalization is to align ourselves with the external world and be right. (When the fox couldn’t reach the grapes, she said it’s better she didn’t, as they are probably sour.)

On the other hand, denial negates that something happened, even though it did. “You offended me.” “I didn’t!” The person genuinely believes it, having their own version of events.

The essence is that people use 62. ego defense mechanisms.

This way, they always end up being correct and protect their ego from injury. As you can see once again, they are not evil, malicious, or crazy; they are just doing what is typical for human behavior and nature.

So, don’t be surprised when you know you’re 100% right about something, but someone insists on the opposite. They are right in their perspective and will even go so far as to find evidence to support their claim, even resorting to psychotic mechanisms.

There’s much more to say, but I hope you’ve learned something from this presentation. If you have, write your thoughts in the comments.

Bonus (Once Again): People Are Not Bad

At least not in the way you think. Let me explain this.

We would never say snakes, scorpions, wolves, or hyenas are evil. They have their own nature, just like people. The difference is obviously that people make decisions about what they will be.

This means that people who see others, take care of them, pay attention to their feelings, they actually overcome their nature. They choose to be better than human (their) nature and that is why they are magnificent.
As you hear, there’s always a better way, and we can always be better people if we decide to and overcome our selfish nature.

We are all incredibly complex, intertwined, and intricate networks of different things: feelings, consciousness, emotions, needs, ideas, fears, character traits, wrong teachings, good decisions, childhood, present, plans for the future, etc. The facts I’ve presented in this blog post stem from our complexity and will manifest differently in relation to who we are.

The traits I listed fall under general and valuable knowledge about people.

It should help you better understand the people in front of you and their reasons for doing certain things. Each of these traits is superficially explained in this post, but enough to get a general picture of the people around you because we tend to observe things from our own personal and very narrow perspective.

In contrast, a change in perspective can bring us extraordinary benefits.

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Verywell Mind – How Personality Impacts Our Daily Lives
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American Psychological Association – Personality
National Center for Biotechnology Information – PubMed Central – Personality: bridging the literatures from human psychology and behavioural ecology

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Written by
Philip S. Holzman

Esther and Sidney R. Rabb Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Harvard University. Coauthor of Assessing Schizophrenic Thinking.

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personality, a characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Personality embraces moods, attitudes, and opinions and is most clearly expressed in interactions with other people. It includes behavioral characteristics, both inherent and acquired, that distinguish one person from another and that can be observed in people’s relations to the environment and to the social group.

The term personality has been defined in many ways, but as a psychological concept two main meanings have evolved. The first pertains to the consistent differences that exist between people: in this sense, the study of personality focuses on classifying and explaining relatively stable human psychological characteristics. The second meaning emphasizes those qualities that make all people alike and that distinguish psychological man from other species; it directs the personality theorist to search for those regularities among all people that define the nature of man as well as the factors that influence the course of lives. This duality may help explain the two directions that personality studies have taken: on the one hand, the study of ever more specific qualities in people, and, on the other, the search for the organized totality of psychological functions that emphasizes the interplay between organic and psychological events within people and those social and biological events that surround them. The dual definition of personality is interwoven in most of the topics discussed below. It should be emphasized, however, that no definition of personality has found universal acceptance within the field.

The study of personality can be said to have its origins in the fundamental idea that people are distinguished by their characteristic individual patterns of behaviour—the distinctive ways in which they walk, talk, furnish their living quarters, or express their urges. Whatever the behaviour, personologists—as those who systematically study personality are called—examine how people differ in the ways they express themselves and attempt to determine the causes of these differences. Although other fields of psychology examine many of the same functions and processes, such as attention, thinking, or motivation, the personologist places emphasis on how these different processes fit together and become integrated so as to give each person a distinctive identity, or personality. The systematic psychological study of personality has emerged from a number of different sources, including psychiatric case studies that focused on lives in distress, from philosophy, which explores the nature of man, and from physiology, anthropology, and social psychology.

The systematic study of personality as a recognizable and separate discipline within psychology may be said to have begun in the 1930s with the publication in the United States of two textbooks, Psychology of Personality (1937) by Ross Stagner and Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937) by Gordon W. Allport, followed by Henry A. Murray’s Explorations in Personality (1938), which contained a set of experimental and clinical studies, and by Gardner Murphy’s integrative and comprehensive text, Personality: A Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure (1947). Yet personology can trace its ancestry to the ancient Greeks, who proposed a kind of biochemical theory of personality.

Physiological type theories

The idea that people fall into certain personality type categories in relation to bodily characteristics has intrigued numerous modern psychologists as well as their counterparts among the ancients. The idea that people must fall into one or another rigid personality class, however, has been largely dismissed. Two general sets of theories are considered here, the humoral and the morphological.

Humoral theories

Perhaps the oldest personality theory known is contained in the cosmological writings of the Greek philosopher and physiologist Empedocles and in related speculations of the physician Hippocrates. Empedocles’ cosmic elements—air (with its associated qualities, warm and moist), earth (cold and dry), fire (warm and dry), and water (cold and moist)—were related to health and corresponded (in the above order) to Hippocrates’ physical humours, which were associated with variations in temperament: blood (sanguine temperament), black bile (melancholic), yellow bile (choleric), and phlegm (phlegmatic). This theory, with its view that body chemistry determines temperament, has survived in some form for more than 2,500 years. According to these early theorists, emotional stability as well as general health depend on an appropriate balance among the four bodily humours; an excess of one may produce a particular bodily illness or an exaggerated personality trait. Thus, a person with an excess of blood would be expected to have a sanguine temperament—that is, to be optimistic, enthusiastic, and excitable. Too much black bile (dark blood perhaps mixed with other secretions) was believed to produce a melancholic temperament. An oversupply of yellow bile (secreted by the liver) would result in anger, irritability, and a “jaundiced” view of life. An abundance of phlegm (secreted in the respiratory passages) was alleged to make people stolid, apathetic, and undemonstrative. As biological science has progressed, these primitive ideas about body chemistry have been replaced by more complex ideas and by contemporary studies of hormones, neurotransmitters, and substances produced within the central nervous system, such as endorphins.

Morphological (body type) theories

Related to the biochemical theories are those that distinguish types of personalities on the basis of body shape ( somatotype). Such a morphological theory was developed by the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer. In his book Physique and Character, first published in 1921, he wrote that among his patients a frail, rather weak ( asthenic) body build as well as a muscular ( athletic) physique were frequently characteristic of schizophrenic patients, while a short, rotund ( pyknic) build was often found among manic-depressive patients. Kretschmer extended his findings and assertions in a theory that related body build and personality in all people and wrote that slim and delicate physiques are associated with introversion, while those with rounded heavier and shorter bodies tend to be cyclothymic—that is, moody but often extroverted and jovial.