Personality

An individual's personality is formed from their unique combination of experiences, thoughts, interests, attitudes, and action tendencies. It is a systematic method of describing the shared components of individuality. Concepts of individuality and personality have developed over millenia through the work of aritists, theologians, philosophers, medical professionals, and scientists across many different disciplines.

A Concise History of Personality

Ancient Greek Origins
(300s BCE)

The concept of persona has origins in ancient Greek drama, where masked characters adopted new roles during a performance (Williams & Bengtsson, 2022). Aristotle defined man as a rational animal.

Theological Intellectual Prominence
(325 - 381 AD)

The concept of roles took root in theological circles with the differentiation between a concept of person and ones' relationship with nature especially as part of the Christian Trinity in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

Early Philosophical Conceptions
(480 - 524)

Boethius defined "persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia", which posited foundational concepts such as individuals being separate from common substance and possessing a rational nature.

Middle Ages
(500 - 1300)

Franciscan thought leaders such as Thomas Aquinas fostered the ideas of the principles of individuation and associated the ability to reason, experienced interiority, and self-mastery to people.

Renaissance Humanism
(1300 - 1700)

The rise of secular humanism and concepts such as autonomy. Early humanists such as Petrarch and Machiavelli rediscovered the classical sources with nostalgia and an intrinsic human reality (Grudin, 2017). The concept of personality began to take further shape with general descriptions of human behavior such as the Decameron, culminating in the application of the scientific method to human behavior.

Modern Philosophy
(1700 - 1850)

Concepts including subjectivity, self-consciousness, and epistemic dualism (the difference between subject and object) led to new forms of personalism and eventually to modern concepts of phenomenology and existentialism. Consequently, Kant advised "Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only".

Origins of Psychology
(1880 - 1940)

Psychology began to take shape as an independent discipline at the end of the 1800s with a focus on studying human behavior and the mind. The field's founders include Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and Sigmund Freud whose work initially focused on experimental psychology, emotion, the concept of self, and psychopathology.

Emergence of Personality Psychology
(1930s)

Psychologists such as Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, and Kurt Lewin established Personality Psychology as a sub-discipline that distinguishes itself by focusing on understanding ourselves and others at the individual level, including exploration of: the whole person; motivational factors; and especially individual differences (McAdams, 1997).

Coalescence towards Five Factors
(1930s - 1980s)

Personality psychology proceeded to explore theories of the self; origins of motivation such as script and socioanalytic theories, affect, and instincts; lexical and construct assessment research, and make substantial progress towards the development an overarching taxonomy of individual personality traits, including the Five Factor (or Big Five) model of personality.

Continued Development and Discovery
(1990s +)

The five factor model has been leveraged as a proxy for defining human character across many fields. As more cross-discipline data is generated and as technology advances, the scientific construct of personality continues to be replicated and validated and is adding many insights into human nature at the individual level (Roberts & Yoon, 2022).

Infographic on the History of Personality

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References

Grudin, R. (2017). Humanism. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/humanism

McAdams, D. P. (1997). A Conceptual History of Personality Psychology. In Hogan, R., Johnson, J., & Briggs, S. (Eds.), Handbook of Personality Psychology (pp. 3-39). San Diego, CA, US: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-134645-4.X5000-8

Roberts, B. W., & Yoon, H. J. (2022). Personality Psychology. Annual review of psychology, 73, 489–516. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-114927

Williams, Thomas D. and Jan Olof Bengtsson, 'Personalism', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/personalism