Personality vs temperament: what is the difference?

What is temperament?

Temperament is the part of personality that shows up first. Researchers define it as early-appearing, biologically based differences in reactivity and self-regulation: how strongly a person responds to a new sound, a stranger's face or a frustrating toy, and how quickly they can settle themselves back down (Rothbart, 2007).

Reactivity is the raw response. One infant startles hard at a loud noise and cries for minutes; another barely blinks. Self-regulation, often called effortful control, is the brake on that response, and it is tied to the brain's networks for executive attention, the same circuitry that later lets a child wait their turn or stay with a hard puzzle (Rothbart, 2007). Both parts are visible well before a child has language, a job or a relationship, which is exactly why researchers call temperament the biological groundwork rather than the finished building.

None of this means temperament is a fixed sentence. It is a starting point, measured the same way personality is measured later: as a tendency, in degree, not as a category a child is sorted into.

What is personality, and how does it differ from temperament?

Personality is the wider pattern. It includes temperament, but it also includes the goals, habits, relationships and self-concept a person builds across a life, on top of that early biological base. Where temperament is mostly about reactivity and self-regulation in the moment, personality covers the whole adult pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes someone recognisable across situations and over time. The full definition sets that out in more detail.

The two words are often used as if they were interchangeable, and in ordinary speech that is harmless. In research they mark different things: temperament is the early, narrower, more biological layer, and personality is the later, broader pattern that includes it.

How does temperament become personality?

Not by simply growing bigger. Researchers describe a set of processes through which the early differences captured by temperament are elaborated, over childhood and adolescence, into the fuller structure of adult personality (Shiner & Caspi, 2003). A child's early reactivity does not sit unchanged inside an adult; it is worked on by parenting, schooling, friendships, culture and the child's own choices, and what comes out the other end is a trait with a longer history than the biology alone would predict.

That elaboration is also how temperament research and personality research end up describing the same territory from two ends. The same broad differences that temperament researchers track in young children connect to the adult traits that personality researchers measure with the Big Five (Rothbart, 2007). A wary, easily startled toddler and a cautious, careful adult are not necessarily the same person years apart, but the constructs used to describe them share a family resemblance for a reason.

Is personality just temperament with an adult name?

Not quite. Temperament and the Big Five overlap, but the Big Five did not come from watching infants. It came from a different direction entirely: researchers combed through the trait words adults use about each other, asked which ones travelled together, and found the same five broad clusters appearing again and again across decades of that lexical work rather than in any single study (Goldberg, 1993). That is the standard description of the adult trait level that the temperament research links back to.

So the relationship runs both ways rather than one word simply renaming the other. Temperament supplies the early, biological end of the story; the Big Five supplies the vocabulary that the adult end of the story is usually written in. Whether that adult vocabulary is largely inherited is a separate question. Averaged across twin and family studies, personality traits are about 40 percent heritable, with twin designs giving somewhat higher estimates than family and adoption designs and the remaining share attributable to environment (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). That is a broad-trait figure, consistent with a biological starting point, not a claim that a single trait or a single gene decides the outcome. The heritability page covers what a percentage like that does and does not mean.

Does personality keep changing, even though temperament appears so early?

Yes, and this is where the two ideas pull apart most clearly. If personality were only temperament grown up, it would stop moving once childhood ended. It does not. Across dozens of longitudinal samples, average levels of Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and social dominance, a facet of Extraversion, rise through adulthood, most steeply between the ages of twenty and forty, while Agreeableness changes mainly later in life. Personality keeps changing well past the point where temperament has finished appearing (Roberts, Walton & Viechtbauer, 2006).

Put the two findings together and the picture is coherent rather than contradictory. Temperament sets an early, biological starting point. Personality is what continues to happen to that starting point for the rest of a life, shaped by roles, effort and circumstance long after the reactivity of infancy has settled into something else.

How does Wellington measure this?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

Wellington is built for the adult end of this story rather than for infant temperament, which needs its own instruments and its own age-appropriate norms. The free Snapshot asks 60 questions, takes about 7 minutes, and measures the six adult dimensions this page has been describing: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility.

Every trait is reported as a percentile against the reference sample. The three bands (Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above) and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete.

The paid Wellington Membership goes further, adding the facets beneath each of the six dimensions and the 24 VIA character strengths, for 90 traits measured in total. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Is temperament the same thing as a personality type?

No. Temperament, like personality, is measured as a set of continuous dimensions such as reactivity and self-regulation, not as a box a child is sorted into (Rothbart, 2007). A type label loses the degree, which is exactly the part that carries the information.

Does a baby's temperament predict their adult personality?

It is linked to it rather than fixing it. Researchers describe processes through which early temperament differences are gradually elaborated into adult personality structure over childhood and adolescence (Shiner & Caspi, 2003), which is a description of development, not a prediction that a wary infant becomes a wary adult.

How much of personality is inherited?

Across twin and family studies, broad personality traits are about 40 percent heritable, with twin designs giving higher estimates than family and adoption designs, and the remaining share attributable to environment (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). That is a starting point shared with temperament, not a ceiling on what experience can do.

Does personality keep changing after childhood, or does temperament just settle?

It keeps changing. Average levels of Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability rise through adulthood, mostly between twenty and forty, and Agreeableness changes mainly later in life (Roberts, Walton & Viechtbauer, 2006). Temperament describes an early starting point; personality describes what keeps happening to it.