Nature v nurture: Is your personality set in stone or can you change it?

The scientific jury is still out on the extent to which genetics influences personality. But psychologists say a 'growth mindset' can help us modify long-held traits without changing our essential nature

Pic: iStock

Personality is difficult to define. Researchers have boiled down ‘personality’ to five traits, known as the Big Five: Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, or OCEAN for short.

While we often think in terms of discrete personality types, such as introvert versus extrovert, we each fall somewhere on a spectrum spanning these two extremes. The OCEAN traits, each of which represents a continuum, have become the scientific standard for classifying personality. And they have been found to be reliable predictors of our future life outcomes.