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 If you're shy and withdrawn, there are shelves of books that will tell you how to become outgoing and, as a natural corollary of that change, bound for success in whatever you do.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.

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