Personality

"Personality measures turn out to be good predictors of your health, your sexual promiscuity, your likelihood of divorce, how happy you typically are—even your taste in paintings. Personality is a much better predictor of these things than social class or age. The origin of these differences is in part innate. That is to say, when people are adopted at birth and brought up by new families, their personalities are more similar to their blood relatives than to the ones they grew up with. The differences begin to emerge early in life and are surprisingly stable across the decades. This is not to say that people cannot change, but major change is the exception rather than the rule. Personality differences tend to manifest themselves through the quick, gut-feeling, intuitive, and emotional systems of the human mind. The slower, rational, deliberate systems show less variation in output from person to person. Deliberate rational strategies can be used to override intuitive patterns of response, and this is how people wishing to change their personalities or feelings have to go about it."