Theories of personality

[lpetrich]

According to mainstream psychology, here is the best-supported personality model:

The  Big Five personality traits or the Five Factor Model:

• Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
• Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless)
• Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. analytical/detached)
• Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident) (may also be called emotional (in)stability)

with acronyms OCEAN and CANOE.

It was derived by asking experimental subjects a large number of questions, then looking for correlations between their answers.

"Extraversion" is often spelled "extroversion" in analogy with "introversion" and compounding letter "o", and likewise for related words.

Two of the Big Five factors can be related to one of the oldest theories of personality,  Four temperaments, proposed by Hippocrates around 400 BCE.

Type	What	E	N	Adler	Element	H/C	W/D	Fluid
Choleric	Short-Tempered or Irritable	+	+	Ruling	Fire	Hot	Dry	Yellow Bile
Sanguine	Optimistic and Social	+	-	Socially useful	Air	Hot	Wet	Blood
Melancholic	Analytical and Quiet	-	+	Avoiding	Earth	Cold	Dry	Black Bile
Phlegmatic	Relaxed and Peaceful	-	-	Getting	Water	Cold	Wet	Phlegm

The fluids are the "humors".
Melancholy = old term for psychological depression
E = extroversion, N = neuroticism (identification by Hans Eysenck)
Hot = E+
Cold = E-
Dry = N+
Wet = N-
Adler is Alfred Adler, a follower of Sigmund Freud who eventually broke with him.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I don't see that it's any good. Personally, I'm experimental or cautious depending on circumstances. I'm conscientious or careless depending on the activity. I'm extravert or reserved depending on the situation and what people look like. I'm friendly and compassionate or analytical and detached according to my understanding of who the other person is. I'm confident or emotional depending on what the interaction and relationship is. Maybe some people, maybe most people, are more consistent but I tend to think most people can adapt their personality to some extent. I believe this is common knowledge. Most, or at least many, people compartmentalise their lives to some extent and can have several faces. Sounds like a winner to me. This would also explain why we don't pay much attention to what psychology says.
EB

 

[lpetrich]

I agree that personality is not something absolutely rigid. But what's important here is what one defaults to when one can easily choose how one is going to act.

When one looks at how other people prefer to act, one discovers a lot of variation, like  Extraversion and introversion. BTW, "extraversion" is often spelled "extroversion" in analogy with "introversion", and likewise for related words.

 

[lpetrich]

There is a six-factor theory called HEXACO that's related to OCEAN by adding Honesty-Humility.

 Myers–Briggs Type Indicator:
The MBTI one often sees in online quizzes, but it seems to have only limited validity as a personality-trait theory. It's also been criticized for implying that we come in 16 personality types, when its results are best interpreted as a continuum. That side, here are its four traits:

• Introversion/Extraversion
• iNtuition/Sensing
• Feeling/Thinking
• Perception/Judging

Treating each one as binary gives the 16 possible MBTI types:

INFP, INFJ, INTP, INTJ, ISFP, ISFJ, ISTP, ISTJ, ENFP, ENFJ, ENTP, ENTJ, ESFP, ESFJ, ESTP, ESTJ

From the Wikipedia article on MBTI, McCrae and Costa find this correlation between MBTI and OCEAN:

	E	O	A	C	N
E-I	−0.74	0.03	−0.03	0.08	0.16
S-N	0.10	0.72	0.04	−0.15	−0.06
T-F	0.19	0.02	0.44	−0.15	0.06
J-P	0.15	0.30	−0.06	−0.49	0.11

The diagonal entries have the strongest correlations.

 

[rousseau]

I agree that personality is not something absolutely rigid. But what's important here is what one defaults to when one can easily choose how one is going to act.

When one looks at how other people prefer to act, one discovers a lot of variation, like  Extraversion and introversion. BTW, "extraversion" is often spelled "extroversion" in analogy with "introversion", and likewise for related words.

The extraversion spectrum doesn't vary within a person. It's quite static and based on certain aspects of a person's neural make-up. That an extreme introvert is *incapable* of being social is a myth, or that an extreme extrovert is *incapable* of being quiet is also a myth. What's relevant about extraversion is that if an introvert is acting social they'll tire out quicker than an extrovert, and conversely an extrovert will get bored if they're alone/quiet.

 

[lpetrich]

The Big Five Project - Personality Test
Big Five Personality Test
The Big Five Personality Test
The 300-Question Personality Test -- it goes into a lot of detail.

Here's what I get:

• Openness -- high
• Conscientiousness -- high
• Extroversion -- low
• Agreeableness -- medium
• Neuroticism -- low

In the MBTI, I usually get INTJ. IMO, it fits fairly well.

There's another personality theory called the Enneagram, because it has 9 types. However, I haven't seen anything about how it's related to the Big Five.

 

[Malintent]

There are actually 10 personality types.

Those that understand binary, and those that do not.

 

[another1]

This stuff is always interesting. I'm taking the 300 question test presently. It doesn't seem very promising. I perform a MMPI on myself and formally with a professional sometimes. I am always an exclusion because the questions are designed to make nothing happen. If you say you like teasing puppies on one page, and say you are protective of them on the next, the whole thing collapses and it is invalid. I can tease a puppy and still love it. You fill in hundreds of circles and end up with nothing. People don't fill in a blank truthfully, even if they think they are truthful, because we want to be what we aren't. We can't answer a question truthfully because we feel inside that we make ourselves what we are when we answer the question. Do you think the whole process is a little presumptuous and archaic? Putting something like who you think you are into circles and assuming you could possibly be correct? Not circles... I meant "blanks" because that makes more sense symbolically.

I don't think personality is personal and I think we're like decorated statues. The archetype is there and the personality is the scarf put on for a brief moment and then second handed to the next person - depending on what situation they're in and who they are with etc. Like there is this tornado of emotion ripping through a field of statues. The tornado destroyed a Goodwill store and the second hand clothes are swirling around and metrosexualizing statues. Like who knows where the wind blows but where the clothes go is how you think you know. I've never met a person with a personality. I meet people with instincts, needs and assumptions. Personalities are too abstract for me to consider real.

Do you think 500 years from now, our psychology texts will be filed under humor, or fiction? Horror maybe. Perhaps even war. Psychology is perverted, discriminative and cruel. I think psychiatry is one of the biggest evils operating in the world right now. That is off point but it isn't. Speakpigeon you described what a personality is, if there is such a thing. What a person should view their own personality as, rather.

 

[Juma]

I agree that personality is not something absolutely rigid. But what's important here is what one defaults to when one can easily choose how one is going to act.

When one looks at how other people prefer to act, one discovers a lot of variation, like  Extraversion and introversion. BTW, "extraversion" is often spelled "extroversion" in analogy with "introversion", and likewise for related words.

The interesting facts about these tests is that thay doesnt give you any new information and they are bad at predict behaviour even at those explicitly asked about.

That is: they are useless.

 

[lpetrich]

The interesting facts about these tests is that thay doesnt give you any new information and they are bad at predict behaviour even at those explicitly asked about.

That is: they are useless.

Why do you say that such tests do not give any new information?

 

[Juma]

The interesting facts about these tests is that thay doesnt give you any new information and they are bad at predict behaviour even at those explicitly asked about.

That is: they are useless.

Why do you say that such tests do not give any new information?

They dont tell you anything you didnt know and they dont tell anyone else anything useful.

The only useful is the individual evaluation parameters (extrovert or not etc) in a handy diagram.

 

[lpetrich]

Why do you say that such tests do not give any new information?

They dont tell you anything you didnt know and they dont tell anyone else anything useful.

That's a common criticism of psychology in general. But while some research may have obvious-looking results, those results may not be as obvious before doing that research. Like the Big Five personality traits. Were they really obvious before they were discovered?

 

[Juma]

They dont tell you anything you didnt know and they dont tell anyone else anything useful.

That's a common criticism of psychology in general. But while some research may have obvious-looking results, those results may not be as obvious before doing that research. Like the Big Five personality traits. Were they really obvious before they were discovered?

Discovered? Come on..

The real claim of these methods is not that people have these five personality traits. It is that people can be objectively grouped into 10-15 groups and that these groups have specific traits that can be used for suitability for different type of jobs.

 

[lpetrich]

The real claim of these methods is not that people have these five personality traits.

Since that was what I was talking about, it seemed to me that you were addressing that claim.

It is that people can be objectively grouped into 10-15 groups

A side effect of dividing a continuum into discrete parts.

Thus, for extroversion and introversion, there is an in-between category, ambiversion, that seems to describe some people very well.

and that these groups have specific traits that can be used for suitability for different type of jobs.

That is an empirical question, and it ought to be addressed empirically.

Introversion vs. Extraversion and Job Performance -- though many employers seem to want extroverts, in some jobs, introverts do better. Like truck driver and long-mission astronaut.

 

[ronburgundy]

I don't see that it's any good. Personally, I'm experimental or cautious depending on circumstances. I'm conscientious or careless depending on the activity. I'm extravert or reserved depending on the situation and what people look like. I'm friendly and compassionate or analytical and detached according to my understanding of who the other person is. I'm confident or emotional depending on what the interaction and relationship is. Maybe some people, maybe most people, are more consistent but I tend to think most people can adapt their personality to some extent. I believe this is common knowledge. Most, or at least many, people compartmentalise their lives to some extent and can have several faces. Sounds like a winner to me. This would also explain why we don't pay much attention to what psychology says.
EB

Well, you're paying so little attention to what Psychology says, that you are misrepresenting what it says and then rejecting a straw man.
First, the biggest critics of the Big 5 theory in the OP, or any notion of stable "personality" are Psychologists. Also, the Big 5 theory allows for the kind of contextual variance in you are describing. The idea is merely that each dimension captures variability in how different people "tend" to behave in situations. For example, almost everyone feels/acts more "shy" or "reserved" among strangers than well known others. That doesn't differentiate people much. How they differ is that some people at their most "shy" are more like how other people are when they are at their most open and extroverted, and some people tend to lose that shyness much more quickly. Basically, if you take two people and measure how "shy" they feel/act across many different observations and situations, one person will have a higher average/typical level of shyness than another. Thus, if you plot the population overall on each person's most typical level of shyness, you get a normal distribution with lots of people neither strongly shy or extroverted but some people strongly at one end of the continuum (though, even these people vary within themselves in level of shyness).

The 5 dimensions are empirically uncorrelated with each other. Thus, where you fall on the continuum for one dimension does not predict where you fall on the others. Thus, while some people are middle of the road on all 5, most people fall farther out from the mean on at least one dimension, with others falling on extremes on several. This creates numerous different patterns/profiles across the 5 dimensions that merely are claimed to reflect differences in what is most typical for a person relative to what is typical for other people.

 

[ronburgundy]

I agree that personality is not something absolutely rigid. But what's important here is what one defaults to when one can easily choose how one is going to act.

When one looks at how other people prefer to act, one discovers a lot of variation, like  Extraversion and introversion. BTW, "extraversion" is often spelled "extroversion" in analogy with "introversion", and likewise for related words.

The interesting facts about these tests is that thay doesnt give you any new information and they are bad at predict behaviour even at those explicitly asked about.

That is: they are useless.

That's a nifty faith-based religion you have there.

First, the purpose of the tests is not to tell people who take them something about themselves that they did not already know. Is the purpose of measuring the atomic weight of a chemical to tell that chemical something about itself that it doesn't already know? The purpose of the tests is a scientific one, to understand some of the dimensions on which humans differ psychologically, and which have some impact on their behaviors.

Second, they do predict various behaviors, as detailed by the link you were given by ignored in deference to your baseless conclusions.

[P]"Extraverts and introverts have a variety of behavioral differences. According to one study, extraverts tend to wear more decorative clothing, whereas introverts prefer practical, comfortable clothes.[29] Extraverts are more likely to prefer more upbeat, conventional, and energetic music than introverts.[30] Personality also influences how people arrange their work areas. In general, extraverts decorate their offices more, keep their doors open, keep extra chairs nearby, and are more likely to put dishes of candy on their desks. These are attempts to invite co-workers and encourage interaction. Introverts, in contrast, decorate less and tend to arrange their workspace to discourage social interaction.[31]"[/P]

Also,
[P]"Researchers have found a correlation between extraversion and self-reported happiness. That is, more extraverted people tend to report higher levels of happiness than introverts."[35][36][/P]

In addition, the test scores are linked to biological and neurological differences that are in turn involved in the kind of behaviors that the personality traits are intended to predict.

[P]"Eysenck proposed that extraversion was caused by variability in cortical arousal. He hypothesized that introverts are characterized by higher levels of activity than extraverts and so are chronically more cortically aroused than extraverts. The fact that extraverts require more external stimulation than introverts has been interpreted as evidence for this hypothesis. Other evidence of the "stimulation" hypothesis is that introverts salivate more than extraverts in response to a drop of lemon juice. This is due to increased activity in their reticular activating system, which responds to stimuli like food or social contact.[24]

Extraversion has been linked to higher sensitivity of the mesolimbic dopamine system to potentially rewarding stimuli.[25] This in part explains the high levels of positive affect found in extraverts, since they will more intensely feel the excitement of a potential reward. One consequence of this is that extraverts can more easily learn the contingencies for positive reinforcement, since the reward itself is experienced as greater.

One study found that introverts have more blood flow in the frontal lobes of their brain and the anterior or frontal thalamus, which are areas dealing with internal processing, such as planning and problem solving. Extraverts have more blood flow in the anterior cingulate gyrus, temporal lobes, and posterior thalamus, which are involved in sensory and emotional experience.[26] This study and other research indicates that introversion-extraversion is related to individual differences in brain function. A study on regional brain volume found a positive correlation between introversion and grey matter volume in the right prefrontal cortex and right temporoparietal junction, as well as a positive correlation between introversion and total white matter volume.[27] Other studies have found correlations between greater volume in the left prefrontal cortex and extraversion. In general, the left prefrontal cortex is connected with the encoding of new episodic memories and "approach" related behavior, while the right prefrontal cortex is involved in the retrieval of episodic memories and behavioral inhibition/"withdrawal" related behavior.[/P]

 

[Juma]

The interesting facts about these tests is that thay doesnt give you any new information and they are bad at predict behaviour even at those explicitly asked about.

That is: they are useless.

That's a nifty faith-based religion you have there.

First, the purpose of the tests is not to tell people who take them something about themselves that they did not already know. Is the purpose of measuring the atomic weight of a chemical to tell that chemical something about itself that it doesn't already know? The purpose of the tests is a scientific one, to understand some of the dimensions on which humans differ psychologically, and which have some impact on their behaviors.

Second, they do predict various behaviors, as detailed by the link you were given by ignored in deference to your baseless conclusions.

No, they doesnt predict behavior, they measure behavior.

 

[ronburgundy]

That's a nifty faith-based religion you have there.

First, the purpose of the tests is not to tell people who take them something about themselves that they did not already know. Is the purpose of measuring the atomic weight of a chemical to tell that chemical something about itself that it doesn't already know? The purpose of the tests is a scientific one, to understand some of the dimensions on which humans differ psychologically, and which have some impact on their behaviors.

Second, they do predict various behaviors, as detailed by the link you were given by ignored in deference to your baseless conclusions.

No, they doesnt predict behavior, they measure behavior.

Science refutes your faith.

The personality scores based on the tests empirically predict observable behaviors that the test themselves do not measure.

 

[Juma]

No, they doesnt predict behavior, they measure behavior.

Science refutes your faith.

The personality scores based on the tests empirically predict observable behaviors that the test themselves do not measure.

Eh. Not really. Most of these dimensions are bull. There is one that get all the attention though since it seems to do what you say: extro/introvertedness. Problem is that the overwhelming majority is at the middle of that scale and that the score isnt stable. To the test some weeks later and you may get another result.

 

[fromderinside]

Science refutes your faith.

The personality scores based on the tests empirically predict observable behaviors that the test themselves do not measure.

Eh. Not really. Most of these dimensions are bull. There is one that get all the attention though since it seems to do what you say: extro/introvertedness. Problem is that the overwhelming majority is at the middle of that scale and that the score isnt stable. To the test some weeks later and you may get another result.

Aw geez. I hate Factor Paralysis. Put in presumptions and out comes factors. OHMYGOD. Science? Not likely.