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Bo-Rin Kim's picture

I am intrigued by the idea

I am intrigued by the idea of how personality affects a person's story teller. I know it is true that personality does affect how people interpret an event or interaction they have because I remember learning this in my personality psychology class. In this course we learned that people with different personalities will interpret the same situation in different ways. For example, someone who is neurotic may interpret the event of not receiving a response from someone they said 'hi' to as they were passing by as that person not liking them whereas someone who is extraverted may just think that the person did not hear them and accidentally did not respond. Thus, it seems as if our personalities do play a big role in what kind of story we tell.

This leads me to wonder whether personality is part of the cognitive unconcious or cognitive conscious. I don't think we really control our personality and sometimes aspects of our personalities manifest in ways we are not conscious of (like in the example above, I doubt the people are consciously aware that their personalities are altering how they interpret the event). Yet, we are aware that we have a personality, and have a general idea of what it is like. If personality is part of the cognitive unconscious, this means that the unconscious shapes the conscious as personality shapes what kind of story we tell to ourselves...which is an interesting idea. Are the two really seperable then?

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