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Natural and adapted personality styles
Have you ever been answering questions in a personality type test and thought: ‘well, that depends on the situation’? Do you sometimes feel like different persons at work and at home? Well, most of us do. One way to look at this is by becoming aware of the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘adapted’ personality styles. Natural personality style Your natural personality style is your ‘default’ way of doing things: how you are without putting effort in it. It is how…
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Interculturalists, how can we use the study of personality?
As intercultural trainers, we often make sure to provide the disclaimer that culture is not an explanation for everything: each individual is different. And then we move on to talk about culture, because that is our expertise. In a parallel universe, there exists another multi-million-dollar industry: of personality typology assessments and trainings. These help organisations and their employees understand how preferences differ and how teams can work better together. Sounds familiar? The point of departure of both intercultural and personality…
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What is me? Two perspectives from East and West
If I have to define who I am – not me in particular but as an individual – I might say that I am the aggregate of my experiences. At any given moment, a human life is a conscious experience plus a recollection of previous experiences stripped off their spatial and temporal aspects: memories, knowledge, skills… They make up who I am. I am my life. Or so I thought before moving to India. There is a short anecdote about…
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Why learning about culture and personality should go hand in hand
The tagline of this website is ‘a website about culture and personality’. I believe that learning about culture and personality should go together. Here are three reasons why I think they are inseparable. 1. Separately they paint an incomplete picture Intercultural communication trainings can sometimes appear deterministic: if you know a person’s culture, you know how to negotiate a business deal with them. But of course, any group or culture is made up of a multitude of different people with…
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Identity is both personal and social
Our identities are formed not only by what makes us different from other individuals, but also by the ways in which we identify with certain others. For example, you are different from your brother because your personalities and interests are different, but you also identify with each other for being part of the same family and sharing the same nationality. Identity is both individual and collective; both personal and social. In their seminal work on intergroup conflict, Henri Tajfel and…
