On Personality Psychology
We should be honest and humble about the field
I think the primary harm of the personality concept lies in a mistaken belief—shared by laypeople and professionals alike—that personality types exist, or that personality can reliably explain or predict behavior in any strong sense. The best research we have does something far more modest: it adjusts probabilities in a system dominated by context, incentives, and circumstance. Personality nudges the odds in one direction or another, but the equation is far too complex—and too situation-dependent—for types or traits to do the explanatory work people want them to.
His equation says that “the situation is usually the most important factor in human decision-making.” I would say that this is especially true if the “situation” includes the people who influence the person.
The “fundamental attribution error” is to overstate the importance of individual personality and to understate the importance of the situation. As far as I know, the fundamental attribution error is a robust finding in psychology—a field where robust findings are rare.
So, yes: everybody is a visionary. Some more than others, but the world is full of vision. The rarer part is the psychological capacity that turns vision into reality. And when you look at the data—whether you use the Big Five or a founder-specific scale—you keep seeing the same story: the people who build things are not just imaginative. They are agentic, resilient, persistent, and able to keep functioning while reality pushes back.
Pointer from Rob Henderson.
I think “survivorship bias.” Let us say you experience a setback. Suppose that if you keep going, there is a small probability that you will succeed, and a bigger probability that you will dig yourself into a deeper hole. Campbell makes it seem as though “keep going” is the right strategy. After all, the successful entrepreneurs all kept going!
Personality psychology tends to seem simpler to do than it really is. Think of there being a path from genes to hormone patterns to “personality” to behavior. In the middle of that path are experiences, relationships, and situations. We often write as if “personality” comes from genes. But the ability to predict behavior from genes is quite limited. It is hard to come up with a reliable polygenic predictor of measured Big Five characteristics. And those characteristics are only modestly predictive of behavior.
substacks referenced above:
@
@
@
Megan McArdle recently linked to an old piece of hers called something like “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?”. I also have been trying to get through - unsuccessfully, it’s very long, although interesting - an article about George Polya’s “How to Solve it” (https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-how-to-solve-it-by-george) that defines intelligence in (to me) a novel way: “Intelligence is the ability of an agent to achieve its goals.”
I don’t know what to make of this, but it seems to me that a lot of people’s orientation is too focused on non-instrumental aspects of our existence, and instead we’d be better off to, say, worry less about personality and more about what causes lead to effects in the world. Not that I’m not interested in personality and psychology – I certainly am! But this focus does, as I suppose is the point of this letter, only capture a small part of the dynamic of what makes things happen in the world. Most people simply do what’s expected in the environment they’re in, and as little of that as possible.
In explaining someone’s choices we can appeal to his settled personality, and his (view of his) situation, and *what else*? His desires and drives and (non-rational) impulses—or are these part of *personality*? His beliefs about matters other than his situation? Something in him that does not count as beliefs or desires or personality traits (what would that be?)?
The presupposed conceptual scheme is obscure to me.