Your Personality Comes from Society More than You May Believe: Here’s the Neuroscience of How

Research shows how we channel information from outside ourselves.

No matter who we are, we depend upon a complex social environment for who we are and become. Individuals are born into a nested series of contexts, from family to friends, education, to broad political, cultural and religious influences. Feral children, deprived of human contact, do not achieve full potential. Traumatized individuals and groups, likewise, experience identity often delimited by adversity.

Is Individual Personality an Illusion?

It is easy to see ourselves as individuals, especially in cultures which exalt individual accomplishment. While we have an innate brain-based predisposition to focus on ourselves, this may merely be a bias which conveys a survival advantage, unique individuality a ghost in the machine.

If the self is inherently social, we may not be able to directly grasp it because of limitations on what we can directly experience and know (Sullivan, 2016, original lecture 1944):

“…[W]e note many things which we do not formulate; that is, about which we do not develop clear ideas of what happened to us. And there is also experience which we do not notice but which can be demonstrated to have occurred in explaining subsequent events.”