High Cognitive Minds

The movies might not seem like a good basis for a discussion of personality but here's a blogger who knows how to make connections that aren't always perfectly obvious. Drawing from a biopic: Schindler's List, and a fantasy: Lord of the Rings, he discusses popular attitudes toward the possibility of becoming anyone we want to be. If you're shy and withdrawn, there are shelves of books that will tell you how to become outgoing and, as a natural corollary of that change, bound for success in whatever you do.

Despite research that tells us our personalities are fairly stable, everything in our culture says otherwise. Schindler's list portrays a profit-minded industrialist who didn't have any problem using Jewish slave labor, but eventually risked his life to save Jews from the Nazis. It can happen, of course, but the movie gives us the impression that it can happen to anybody. The truth, which the post almost manages to touch on, is that it wasn't Schindler's personality that changed, but his motivations, his understanding of what he was doing and how that had to change.

Few of us have the opportunity for such a dramatic life-change, such a moral dilemma to work through, but if we do, how we will respond depends on our personality. The personality traits that we were born with largely determine how we function in the world. We can work to be more outgoing if we're introverts, but that introversion will still be intact because it's part of our neurological makeup.

Again, the post doesn't quite hit the right note when discussing Aragorn and Boromir, in Lord of the Rings. Are their actions a result of personality or merely an illustration of the inevitability of fate? Aragorn is clearly a retiring man who does what is required of him, but prefers to stay in the shadows. This seems to be as much a matter of his innate personality as his desire not to be associated with the ancestor who could have destroyed the ring of power but didn't. And Boromir? An outgoing fellow of obvious bravery, but struggling with the conflict between loyalty to the fellowship, and his father's demand for the key to their land's salvation. The interesting question is whether Boromir's fate would have been different if his personality had been different. He clearly basked in the admiration of his soldiers, and even though he knew that his father's desire for the ring was wrong, he wanted to please him. Would he have been able to resist the lure of the ring if he'd had Aragorn's independence of mind?

Personality is an intriguing subject, always shifting and capable of many interpretations. "Most of us have not faced, and probably never will face, the moral dilemma of Oskar Schindler. Neither will any of us save Middle Earth from hordes of orcs. In reality life is much more mundane. But just because most of us will never face the extreme situations portrayed in these movies, it doesn't mean watching them won't affect the way we think about ourselves."

Read and enjoy. Can You Change Your Personality? Lord of the Rings vs. Schindler's List