Personality or Character?

When I was in high school, there was a community club in a nearby neighbourhood that ran on Saturday mornings. The club aimed at engaging with kids in the community and giving them meaningful and fun experiences. A friend who was a long-standing attendee in this club (he even learned how to play chess there) invited me one day to join. As a high school kid, I had nothing better to do on a Saturday morning, so I decided to join in.

The club would bring together young kids in primary and high school, to be mentored by volunteering university students. It was a nice idea as it gives the university students some voluntary experience and builds their leadership skills, as well as provide kids with some productive time where they can learn new things and make friends.

At first, I thought it was just a club where we simply have fun playing football, but I was quite surprised on my first day. During the club session (about half a Saturday morning) we would split into teams to play football (soccer for my American friends) and some other games for about an hour, and then we take a little break and then there would be some time for either playing once again or taking advantage of the mentor programme and get some help from the mentors (for school homework for example). During that break, one of the mentors would give a talk about certain human virtues to educate us kids and make us understand certain qualities of humanity. I really enjoyed going to this club and kept going as much as I could for my remaining time in school.

One of the talks that we were given particularly stuck with me. It was a talk about personality and character, and the difference between them. I don’t recall every aspect of the talk, but I remember learning the difference between the two: character was your moral base (in general terms), and personality was your outer shell. This talk is the only one I remember from my time in the club because it resonated with me the most.

While personality and character are different, they both represent who we are. Personality is simply who we seem to be to other people, and I believe it is built based on the environment we are currently in.

Typically, the opportunity to spot the difference doesn’t present itself in daily life, but I do remember a moment from when I was in school that demonstrated this quite clearly. I am an immigrant who came to the UK and settled, and, as most people would, I gravitates towards people in similar situations so I had many immigrant friends. There was a particular friend who came to the UK long before I did and his fluency in English was, expectedly, much better than mine.

In Glasgow, Scotland, where I live, the English accent is quite unique and often seems strong to outsiders. Curiously, most immigrants don’t end up adopting it even if they learn English while living here, and I believe the reason is that their multilingual nature usually doesn’t help with such a vast change in the way of speaking, so most of us have an almost unidentifiable accent when speaking English, unless we came here when we were very young.

Anyway, after that unnecessarily long background, a friend was once speaking to me in his normal accent, and then a Scottish friend of his came over and this friend almost immediately switched his accent and spoke Glaswegian. This is just a small example to show that personality can be changed based on environment, whether intentional or not.

Now let’s talk about character. Character is the moral centre of a person which they had built up early in life. I believe character is often built on a combination of common sense, country law and family life. For many of us, religion is another major factor.

I have grown up in a typical family, and my morals were shaped by them, the law of the country and my religion. There are certain things which I may have views on that I would never compromise because of the character I've built around the aforementioned factors. I’ve learned how to behave in general and, more particularly, how to behave and talk to those older than I am. I would not drink alcohol. I would try to see fairness where possible, and I would never say anything to someone that would make them genuinely upset. Of course, there are other aspects to my character, but I would need a little more investigation and introspection before I figure them out.

I won’t be generalising much in what I say, so I will be talking about myself for the most part, as I can’t speculate on other people’s traits.

I do notice that my personality changes depending on who I am with. At work I would have a certain demeanour, and when I'm with friends, I’m quite different. I think this is the same for most people.

As I said above, I never say anything to insult anyone or make them genuinely upset, and I believe that is part of my character. I do, however, swear when I’m with friends; we play video games almost every night after work, as we don’t see each other face to face often. In these games we swear at each other, but we understand that all of it is contained within that set environment... it’s all only about the game we’re playing. We play online multiplayer games and swear at each other when we play poorly, but we never insult each other with things that are not related (for example each other’s physical attributes). When we do meet up face to face (in a restaurant or the cinema for example) we don’t speak to each other like that.

I say things I don’t usually say when I’m playing video games, however, I still maintain that I don’t insult people or make them genuinely upset despite that. This is an example of how despite personality changing, the traits of the character still remain.

In simple terms, despite the personality, character traits are lines that we would not cross. This is just an interesting aspect of humanity and our behaviour I wanted to talk about here, and I welcome your opinions and anything you would like to add. I truly relish such conversations, so feel free to say whatever you think in the comments.