Typing: Nature or Nurture?

[Amy Winehouse]

Sorry if this is one of those unanswerable questions, but I'm only asking for insight.

Do people develop their types in their early stages, being necessarily influenced by their environments? Or are their types determined from day 1.

I spent a lot of my childhood reading and in front of a computer. Did that make me an introvert? Or was I reading alone alot BECAUSE I was in introvert. I feel like this is a chicken and egg question, but does anyone have any further reading on this or personal insight?

Could a person's type be artificially molded in their early stages? NOT using genetic engineering, but just using environment control. There's a correlation between parent's types and their children's types, supposedly hereditary. But that says nothing about whether or not that correlation couldn't have stemmed from the fact that parents are the most influential role models in a child's life (in general)

Thoughts?

 

[Dapper Dan]

Theoretically speaking, I believe type is supposed to be pure nature. Environmental modifications can influence your apparent type, but you'll always have the same natural state.

Practically speaking, nothing about MBTI is empirical, and the fact that types don't apply until a certain age suggests that nurture may have a significant role.

 

[Auburn]

From my experience, I've seen type is something Nature based. A child is born with a disposition, and even before it begins to crawl it will exhibit it's preferences. When it learns to walk, it'll automatically follow the modus operandi embedded within it and exhibit it in the way it plays and so forth.

Generally, a person's personality is most transparent and apparent in early childhood because this is *before* any social/environmental conditioning shapes them otherwise. They start to become more complicated when they reach the age where they understand consequences, dos & donts, rules, etc -- but that still doesn't change what is innate to them.

You don't have to look very far to find an example of a pair of parents that are completely different from their child -- and the child does and acts in ways the parents nor the environment ever nurtured them into. Despite the parent's will, the child does it's own thing.


Tl;dr - Yes, type is almost certainly genetic.