It strikes that many of the suggested identities imply a high level of “openness to experience”—one of the “big five” personality traits. Now according to some studies openness to experience is 57 % heritable (highest of the big five). This suggests that it is not change your level of openness to experience, which means that if you’re not open to experience, the identities suggested in this post would be hard to take.
Curious. I remember there being some evidence that openness to exerperience is actually relatively malleable; something like students spending some time abroad coming back with higher openness. My introspective experience seems to agree with this.
If it’s 57% heritable, then ~40% of the difference is due to other factors, many of which you can control. Imagine someone at the 40th percentile of openness and contrast them with someone at the 80th percentile of openness. 40% is a lot.
I think that openness can be changed to some degree. However, even though I think that traits that are highly heritable are harder to change generally, I don’t think one could say that one could say that the fact that openness to experience is 57 % heritable means that we have control over 43 % of our openness.
For instance, openness to experience is 57 % heritable in the present social set-up. This does not conclusively show, however, that it wouldn’t be much less (or more) heritable in other social set-ups. For instance, it might be possible to develop techniques that increase openness to experience radically.
Conversely, non-heritable factors might be beyond our conscious control (as you indeed point out). A person with low openness to experience due to childhood traumas might have at least as hard a time changing level of openness as a person who is not so open to experience for biological reasons.
In general, I think, though, that high degrees of heritability signals that it is not easy for the individual to radically change the trait in question.
Curious. I remember there being some evidence that openness to exerperience is actually relatively malleable; something like students spending some time abroad coming back with higher openness. My introspective experience seems to agree with this.
If it’s 57% heritable, then ~40% of the difference is due to other factors, many of which you can control. Imagine someone at the 40th percentile of openness and contrast them with someone at the 80th percentile of openness. 40% is a lot.
I think that openness can be changed to some degree. However, even though I think that traits that are highly heritable are harder to change generally, I don’t think one could say that one could say that the fact that openness to experience is 57 % heritable means that we have control over 43 % of our openness.
For instance, openness to experience is 57 % heritable in the present social set-up. This does not conclusively show, however, that it wouldn’t be much less (or more) heritable in other social set-ups. For instance, it might be possible to develop techniques that increase openness to experience radically.
Conversely, non-heritable factors might be beyond our conscious control (as you indeed point out). A person with low openness to experience due to childhood traumas might have at least as hard a time changing level of openness as a person who is not so open to experience for biological reasons.
In general, I think, though, that high degrees of heritability signals that it is not easy for the individual to radically change the trait in question.