Social Context & Experience

• Hypothesis 1: Social context shapes our personality

  “Events in the lives of individuals as having no meaning except as participating in a collective whole” - Alfred Adler
• Hypothesis 1: Social context shapes our personality


  • It is common for PhD students to feel like an imposter (Baldwin, Mills, Birks, & Budden, 2014).
  • They have a tendency to attribute success to external factors and feel like a fraud (Clance & Imes, 1978)
  • Imposter syndrome may lead to high levels of perfectionism and workaholic behaviours (Parkman, 2016), that negatively affect wellbeing (Kiley, 2009)
• Hypothesis 2: Our experiences shape our personality

  The Jungian psychoanalytic approach

  • Extraversion focuses on the external world: the contents of consciousness refer mainly to external objects in the world
  • Introversion is internally orientated: the contents of consciousness refer more to the self (what is within a person).
• Hypothesis 2: our experiences shape our personality

  Carl Jung developed his ideas from psychoanalytic theory and clinical observation.

  • The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Conley, Durlak, Shapiro, Kirsch, & Zahniser, 2016) is based on Jungian personality types and is frequently used in the occupational setting
• Hypothesis 2: our experiences shape our personality

  However, the authors state:

  • “It is unethical, and in many cases illegal, to require job applicants to take the Indicator if the results will be used to screen out applicants.”
  • Rather the indicator might be used to profile individuals to help them understand their strengths and weaknesses as individuals and working within a team.
• Hypothesis 3: Genes interact with our environment to shape our personality.

  “instinctual drives” interact with childhood developmental experiences to shape our personality.

  Sigmund Freud