Almost every finding in a BBC article called “How where you grow up affects your personality” is about how culture shapes you.

Almost.

Buried deep is another finding. Your political identity shapes your perception of someone else’s authenticity. Rather than “culture influences personality” it’s proof how “ideology determines who gets to count as real.”

…researchers asked people with different political views to evaluate the morality of a Christian man who was attracted to other men. People who identified as liberals thought the man was acting according to his true self, while people who identified as conservatives believed instead he was going against his true, Christian self.

The article frames it as a curiosity about the philosophy of selfhood. What it actually demonstrates is the mechanism by which political identity becomes a tool for defining other people’s inner lives.

The ideologue doesn’t just disagree with their opponent about policy, they disagree about what’s actually happening inside another human being. And vice versa.

Each side arrogates the authority to adjudicate someone else’s ontological status.

Sartre is rolling in his grave.

That’s not a personality trait shaped by geography. That’s a power claim disguised as an observation about human nature. And this article tries to bury it between paragraphs about twin studies and underwater scene descriptions as if an antithesis isn’t what it is.