Blog 6 - Mr Seto - Li Bin (Lionel) - Genes and Environment Decide Our Personalities

Personality has become a hot topic all around the world nowadays. People use tests online or ask the psychologists to find their personalities in order to make their careers or marriage clear. Some teenagers even choose their lovers by personality. However, where are our personalities originated from? Is it decided by our genes or influenced by the environment?

   At first, I thought that our personalities are totally decided by the environment where we are growing up. Because I believe that people’s personalities can be changed by the environment we lived in, by the people we met, by the education we received. We all know that those children who were brought up by wolf are very similar with wolves, so the characteristics which are decided by genes cannot appear because of the environment. However, the truth is that genes also play an important part in the personalities, which I knew from a science magazine. One essential part through which genes control people’s personalities is intelligence. People’s intelligence is related to the ability to make a decision or solve certain problems which can affect people’s personalities. Some people are easy to be sad or angry and some are easy to be happy. That is related to some chemical materials secreted by certain organs. And it is decided by our genes which can hardly be changed by the environment.

   Our personalities, which are related to our daily lives and the success, are decided by both genes and environment. What we can hardly change is the genes we have, so we are supposed to build our personalities by environment, by ourselves.