The entire concept of this thread could be boiled down to a nature vs. nurture question. For example we know for a fact that person's socio-economic situation, cultural influences, parental influences, and education have -huge- implications that shap someone; especially in their formative years (roughly ages 3 to 12). How you develop personally and psychologically will have large influences on what skills you develop and especially on what fields of interest you have.
Now before anyone raises their finger to go "BUT...!" yes, we do account for outliers in these situations. They're called outliers for a reason and will continue to be outliers until the 'average' stops being average.
What does all that pyschobabble mean for the layman and/or roleplayer? Well it means that if you really want to crawl into your character's head and determine their life from A to B, why they are the profession they are in your RP, and how that came about? You essentially need to design an actual human being from birth to adulthood. Sounds pretty daunting, doesn't it? Good. It should be. Especially since the goal for so many is 'immersion' and all that.Â
As a sidenote, you don't need to 'live the life of your character from age three to thirty' in order to figure out the kind of person they are. It's shown in the majority of psych-studies that 'in general' while environment often influences nature, it's major events that will stick with the individual. So just bullet point out largely influential events in their life and fill in the rest as you go; in fact the 'rest' will practically fill itself in for you.
Now before anyone raises their finger to go "BUT...!" yes, we do account for outliers in these situations. They're called outliers for a reason and will continue to be outliers until the 'average' stops being average.
What does all that pyschobabble mean for the layman and/or roleplayer? Well it means that if you really want to crawl into your character's head and determine their life from A to B, why they are the profession they are in your RP, and how that came about? You essentially need to design an actual human being from birth to adulthood. Sounds pretty daunting, doesn't it? Good. It should be. Especially since the goal for so many is 'immersion' and all that.Â
As a sidenote, you don't need to 'live the life of your character from age three to thirty' in order to figure out the kind of person they are. It's shown in the majority of psych-studies that 'in general' while environment often influences nature, it's major events that will stick with the individual. So just bullet point out largely influential events in their life and fill in the rest as you go; in fact the 'rest' will practically fill itself in for you.
