People are motivated by genetics and memetics. Genetics makes us get hungry when we don’t eat, gives us sexual urges, things like that that we share with even the simpler forms of life. How we are affected and influenced by those stimuli is largely a matter of genetics.
How we react to those stimuli is governed by culture, or memetics. Like genes, memetic frameworks are also passed on generationally, but with a much higher mutation rate.
Genetics is hardware, which defines possible behaviors. Memetics is operating system and applications, defining actual behaviors.
Similar experience/perspective as the gp. People in different places are, in many if not most cases, just fundamentally different in countless ways.
I think both genetics (personality, among endless other characteristics is significantly to majority heritable and going to have different distributions in different areas) and environment/culture play significant roles.
But an interesting thing is that by the time people are adults, perhaps even before, the environmental factors have irreversibly changed them so marginalising cultural factors as "just" environmental doesn't really paint a fair picture.
For a person who's happy to travel/live just about anywhere this makes having children doubly fun, because you basically get to decide the 'cultural mold' for your children, which is really neat!
Culture is everything. Culture being the people you're surrounded with on a daily basis, not the culture of an arbitrary geography. The people you interact with in your home, at school, at work, at the church/sports club. What is the distribution of their actions, values, practices?
It is the major decider from the way one talks, one walks, one acts, one decides, everything.
Can it be overruled by nature? Yes, very rarely. There's always a very small percentage of people (often thought of as neurodivergent, or witches, or simply free-spirited or eccentric, all case by case) who's neurogenetics cause them to partiaLly diverge. But these are the exceptions.
This has been proven false. To name just one measure of human behavior, the Big Five personality traits are 40-60% heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201596
This is commonly stated but seems more driven by ideology than science. People's racial identity is near to perfectly correlated with their genetic identity as can be ascertained with a very limited number of genetic markers.
And essentially all of species related biology would be a 'social construct' by such logic. The difference between entire species is often poorly defined. Different species can even interbreed and produce fertile offspring such as a liger. Or take the Australian Dingo which is literally just a wild dog, but it's not classified as one for quite arbitrary reasons.
I would call it culture. How you are educated, what you see around since day 0 on. It is very hard to escape it and unless you travel and live in another country you will not even be aware of such things (and even then you need a certain level of introspection).
We all differ in nature and nurture - in subtle and major ways.
We're knowledgeable people here, so we know there's no such thing as race other than as a human artifact. As human artifact, it can certainly affect how we think and therefore how we behave.
