Well, you're paying so little attention to what Psychology says, that you are misrepresenting what it says and then rejecting a straw man.
I was paying attention to what the OP said and I responded to that.
The OP linked to information that you paid no attention to, plus your response misrepresented what was quoted in the OP itself.
I also didn't represent psychology at all so I couldn't possibly have mirepresented it.
You most certainly did represent psychology. You said that "this is why we don't pay much attention to what
psychology says." , which refers to psychology in general, not limited to the OP, nor even the personality theory it refers to. You contrasted your view against "what Psychology says" implying they are opposed, when in fact, Psychology "says" everything you said regarding variability from situation to situation.
First, the biggest critics of the Big 5 theory in the OP, or any notion of stable "personality" are Psychologists.
So why reply to my post instead of directly addressing
Ipetrich's? He claimed what he presented to be "mainstream psychology". Now you are saying that psychologists are the "biggest" critics of it. Yet, you didn't comment on the OP when you had something to say to comment on my post where you had nothing to say. That's absurd.
You are the one who mischaracterized both what the OP said and what Psychology more generally says about personality. So, it made sense to reply to your mischaracterization, and in doing so, provide some added information to what was in the OP, which wasn't incorrect, simply incomplete.
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.
Tell
Ipetrich!
I am telling you, because your reply shows you don't understand this regarding personality theories in psychology. Ipetrich's post did not demonstrate such a lack of understanding. He/she never implied that personalities are rigid and invariable. It was you that leapt to the unfounded conclusion that personalities refer to rigid invariable ways of being rather than relative tendencies.
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.
I think these categories tend to give people a false notion that they have a deeply entrenched personality and that's a very bad trick to play on many people. I've met people throughout my life who tried to understand their lives and solve their problems. I never met one who would have been helped by a stronger belief that he or she had a deeply entrenched personality. Me I think it's better to increase the confidence the person has that he or she can change. The idea of personality is the opposite of that. Maybe it works for selling cars and life insurances but I think it's really counterproductive for improving one's life.
How people might be impacted by information about themselves is irrelevant to whether that information is valid and true. Being told you have a degenerative disease might have positive or negative impacts on that person, but all those are irrelevant to the whether it is true that they have a degenerative disease.
However, it seems that the field of psychology must face this source of anti-science moreso than other fields. Many people are willing to blindly dismiss psychology as a field "they shouldn't listen to", not because it doesn't have valid information to give but because they don't like that information or don't like how some people might react to that information. It is like conservatives who reject biological explanations for homosexual or criminal behavior, simply because they think this people an excuse to do things that they thinks it is wrong to do.
Also, such information about one's personality can easily be beneficial. Happiness is greatly impacted by whether one's circumstances match those that one prefers. Knowing oneself and one's emotional and behavioral tendencies are neccessary to optimizing the match between one's circumstances and one's preferences.
