Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Handle says "Personality are those individually distinct tendencies which, even after you correct for experience and learning, don't go away." That is, what is really interesting about personality is how apparently hardwired and inflexible it is. The "surfing uncertainty" model of cognition and mental process is that they are doing all kinds of automatic Bayesian updating based on experiences and environmental cues and this relatively plastic and adjustable over time. But core personality traits don't seem to adjust much. General levels of fear and anxiety, hesitancy vs recklessness, and so forth seem to be very little moved by experience, and I find that most people's levels of fear or carelessness about any particular danger or risk to be wildly miscalibrated compared to reality, but more to the point, in a manner that tends to -stay- that way regardless of what happens or any effort to argue them out of it with logic and evidence. It is interesting to wonder why nature seems to want to produce a wide mix of personalities (one sees this even along genetically close siblings in homogenous populations) and put some kind of cognitive friction into preventing those personalities from adjusting much.
Psychologists generally call this "temperament", what you're born with, and "personality" what happens when temperament interacts with experience. Experience can change how temperament is expressed, but only within limits. I was actually kind of shocked when I learned how much temperament researchers do not go along with the blank slate model that is hegemonic in much of social science. (Though much of the research is about how temperament is not destiny, how its expression can be changed, in a bad way by bad environment or in a good way by good parenting or counseling.)
My preference is for technical fields to not commandeer ordinary words with long established traditions of being widely understood in the usual way just to use them as terms of art with new, esoteric meanings, but to invent altogether new terms to mark out distinct, precise concepts. American Law is an extreme case completely overloaded with twisted English (e.g., 'malice'). Physics is not perfect but pretty good with things like "neutron". Medicine is an exception in which more simple vernacular would be better than mere Greek and Latin translations are often no more than pretentious restatements of presented symptoms but mislead lay patients into believing there is a more precise understanding of a particular disease condition than there really is.
I'm guilty of re-using personality of course, though in my defense that's because the subject matter references "personality types". With regards to personality, character, temperament, makeup, "In one's nature", and so forth, it'd be best to avoid using any one of these established words to mark the operational difference between those behavioral and cognitive tendencies that for typical individual, on the one hand, plastic, flexible, easily modified by experience and environment, and on the other hand, inborn, inflexible and enduring for long periods of one's life. It's easy to observe the empirical validity of types and these best map to a concept focused on what tends to be lasting and rigid.
I am reminded of a Normal Mailer observation: "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."
HEXACO makes more sense to me than the Big Five. It’s the only way I can explain myself - a generally agreeable person - *except* when it comes to honesty. What is most important to me is honesty. Before someone crosses that line, they might have thought I was quite sweet, but actually… no. Not when honesty is on the line. I can see it writ large in my kids too. I wonder how common it is in academics?
Are you honest about sex differences causing lots of different outcomes? About genetics influencing IQs, and clear group corollaries?
I guess above you’re an N on the 4 axis MBTI, which is the test I still find most useful among normal folk, but the Honesty axis is quite important to those willing to suffer from mob consensus against the Truth. Which is, sadly, a small minority of those who need a job.
Please keep being honest, Trustworthy is the first Boy Scout virtue.
Absolutely. I know I got my commitment to honesty from my Mum, for example, and I’ve obviously passed it on to my kids (both daughter and sons). Some of it is nature, some of it is nurture. And I am indeed an N on MBTI - big picture person. I am also an unusual woman, I suspect - more on the tomboy side of the spectrum - until I was about 7, I only had one female friend, because I found boys easier to deal with. If they had a problem with you they told you and vice versa.
Since people have kept responding to the post; I figure I should examine the foundational assumptions. This proved more difficult than I anticipated.
The basic difference is between a scale that measures 'how good of a person you are' and 'what kind of person you are, good or bad' - and scales that conflate the two. So, a scale like MB purports to show tradeoffs in a number of independent traits which are independent of 'goodness.' Meanwhile, something that has five independent traits which are all described as unipolar 'good' qualities must either be confined to some fixed surface (to become a trade space) or it conflates how good of a person you are with what kind of person you are (in a rather value-free or non-judgmental way).
Not that there are no uses for a judgmental scale, but perhaps these are rather different; and there are some 'very' non-judgmental world views that would discount all such scales.
There are also various ways to convert apparently non-judgmental scales to judgmental ones, like suggesting that a particular trait is needed at a certain time, or that particular combinations are 'dangerous' (see all the talk around dark triad). This rhetorical play is common.
So if Honesty is going to be one end of a scale, is dishonesty the other pole? That doesn't fit the purpose of a M-B type test. As a result, I'm suggesting that there must be something else at the other end, which can be identified as a good quality. It becomes a bit awkward, because Honesty is so ... good sounding. There are some cases in which it can be balanced against other things, as Arnold points out. Perhaps there is a 'speak it as you see it' vs 'consider the impact of your words before speaking' axis. In that case, it isn't really 'honesty' per se that is being valued. Or it might be 'optimism vs critical evaluation'
Anyway, this discussion in even more complex form goes back at least as far as Thomas Aquinas, who suggested that every virtue had corresponding vices - at both extremes. So 'religion' - for him a virtue - could have a deficit and a surfeit. Too little was atheism, too much was superstition. The best person would be moderate in all things (which leads to the discussion of how to be moderate in moderation, and in what things moderation is no virtue, etc).
Right there with you. The math underlying Big Five may be valid, but the choice of labels kills it. Who wants to be "disagreeable?" (Well, actually, psychologists spend quite a lot of their time teaching people how to be more disagreeable - or, at least, a whole lot less agreeable - because many people are so agreeable it makes them chronically unhappy.) The implicit judgments in agreeable/conscientious/neurotic/open are apparent to everyone and presumably steer the participants in answering the questions - and probably influence the wording of the questions.
It seems to me that each end of each dimension of the Big Five is actually a drawback rather than a positive. You can be too disagreeable - but also too agreeable. Too un-conscientious, but also too conscientious - or neurotic, or open.
Meters Briggs N-S remains a key difference. Abstract (iNtuitive) vs Concrete (Sensitive, specific) remains a huge personality axis understudied by pro psychologists. I’m sure the majority of the 25% or so abstract Ns go to college, and support Dems.
(90% or more of readers here are Ns, most are NTs, like me)
Dark & Light triads remain talked about among the professionals more than MBTI. For most normal folk, the 4 main, and 16 total types have a far higher Usability Index score combining accurate insights AND remembering them AND combining them. 5 has a lot more combos than 4, and 6 even more.
Naturally, most normals are more similar, while the abnormals are more uniquely abnormal (as good writers know and use.)
Personality is bunk. The false self. The ego. All useful for dealing with physical reality, but ultimately mirages leading us further from our true being.
I find that mostly or completely true of these types of personality categories. Trying to understand one's own and other's personality, especially one's own strengths and weaknesses can have benefits. I suppose these tests and categories can help with that but in my experience mostly not.
“I am generally low in emotionality, but I do fear physical danger”
God created men, but Samuel Colt made them equal. I’m feeble like Arnold and the introduction of firearms into my life helped to eliminate my fear of physical danger from others. The playing field got leveled so to speak.
Blessed are they who can gain this assurance. For some of us, the fear would be replaced by the fear that our impulsiveness and our fairly constant episodes of rage would make that gun go off in the third act and we would very much regret it. I guess that's fear and loathing of the self. However, the flip side of that impulsiveness and anger is that I have no fear of physical danger. Even as a woman, on the couple of occasions when menace was in play, I turned into a hellcat. I am as quick in my own defense as I am quick to anger. Now, admittedly, my husband has pointed out this is a false bravado, or rather the bravado is quite real if transient but the consequences for a 120lb. woman would be the same no matter what. But it is a small consolation when one's genetics are otherwise so damning.
Except maybe under "rules of stupid" conditions or being stalked by someone violent, it's not so much a fear as reality. Then again, the exceptions might be the worst times to rely on a gun. Either way, I hope I never feel I need to carry a gun for protection from humans.
Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Handle says "Personality are those individually distinct tendencies which, even after you correct for experience and learning, don't go away." That is, what is really interesting about personality is how apparently hardwired and inflexible it is. The "surfing uncertainty" model of cognition and mental process is that they are doing all kinds of automatic Bayesian updating based on experiences and environmental cues and this relatively plastic and adjustable over time. But core personality traits don't seem to adjust much. General levels of fear and anxiety, hesitancy vs recklessness, and so forth seem to be very little moved by experience, and I find that most people's levels of fear or carelessness about any particular danger or risk to be wildly miscalibrated compared to reality, but more to the point, in a manner that tends to -stay- that way regardless of what happens or any effort to argue them out of it with logic and evidence. It is interesting to wonder why nature seems to want to produce a wide mix of personalities (one sees this even along genetically close siblings in homogenous populations) and put some kind of cognitive friction into preventing those personalities from adjusting much.
Psychologists generally call this "temperament", what you're born with, and "personality" what happens when temperament interacts with experience. Experience can change how temperament is expressed, but only within limits. I was actually kind of shocked when I learned how much temperament researchers do not go along with the blank slate model that is hegemonic in much of social science. (Though much of the research is about how temperament is not destiny, how its expression can be changed, in a bad way by bad environment or in a good way by good parenting or counseling.)
My preference is for technical fields to not commandeer ordinary words with long established traditions of being widely understood in the usual way just to use them as terms of art with new, esoteric meanings, but to invent altogether new terms to mark out distinct, precise concepts. American Law is an extreme case completely overloaded with twisted English (e.g., 'malice'). Physics is not perfect but pretty good with things like "neutron". Medicine is an exception in which more simple vernacular would be better than mere Greek and Latin translations are often no more than pretentious restatements of presented symptoms but mislead lay patients into believing there is a more precise understanding of a particular disease condition than there really is.
I'm guilty of re-using personality of course, though in my defense that's because the subject matter references "personality types". With regards to personality, character, temperament, makeup, "In one's nature", and so forth, it'd be best to avoid using any one of these established words to mark the operational difference between those behavioral and cognitive tendencies that for typical individual, on the one hand, plastic, flexible, easily modified by experience and environment, and on the other hand, inborn, inflexible and enduring for long periods of one's life. It's easy to observe the empirical validity of types and these best map to a concept focused on what tends to be lasting and rigid.
I am reminded of a Normal Mailer observation: "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same."
HEXACO makes more sense to me than the Big Five. It’s the only way I can explain myself - a generally agreeable person - *except* when it comes to honesty. What is most important to me is honesty. Before someone crosses that line, they might have thought I was quite sweet, but actually… no. Not when honesty is on the line. I can see it writ large in my kids too. I wonder how common it is in academics?
Are you honest about sex differences causing lots of different outcomes? About genetics influencing IQs, and clear group corollaries?
I guess above you’re an N on the 4 axis MBTI, which is the test I still find most useful among normal folk, but the Honesty axis is quite important to those willing to suffer from mob consensus against the Truth. Which is, sadly, a small minority of those who need a job.
Please keep being honest, Trustworthy is the first Boy Scout virtue.
Absolutely. I know I got my commitment to honesty from my Mum, for example, and I’ve obviously passed it on to my kids (both daughter and sons). Some of it is nature, some of it is nurture. And I am indeed an N on MBTI - big picture person. I am also an unusual woman, I suspect - more on the tomboy side of the spectrum - until I was about 7, I only had one female friend, because I found boys easier to deal with. If they had a problem with you they told you and vice versa.
Probably not.
I wish this were not so. (I am an academic. I get into trouble because of my honesty, but I actually think it’s really important…)
In any personality scale, look for each dimension to have positive attributes at both ends of the scale, otherwise it's a scale of 'things I like.'
Why aren't the positives at both ends also "things I like"?
Since people have kept responding to the post; I figure I should examine the foundational assumptions. This proved more difficult than I anticipated.
The basic difference is between a scale that measures 'how good of a person you are' and 'what kind of person you are, good or bad' - and scales that conflate the two. So, a scale like MB purports to show tradeoffs in a number of independent traits which are independent of 'goodness.' Meanwhile, something that has five independent traits which are all described as unipolar 'good' qualities must either be confined to some fixed surface (to become a trade space) or it conflates how good of a person you are with what kind of person you are (in a rather value-free or non-judgmental way).
Not that there are no uses for a judgmental scale, but perhaps these are rather different; and there are some 'very' non-judgmental world views that would discount all such scales.
There are also various ways to convert apparently non-judgmental scales to judgmental ones, like suggesting that a particular trait is needed at a certain time, or that particular combinations are 'dangerous' (see all the talk around dark triad). This rhetorical play is common.
So if Honesty is going to be one end of a scale, is dishonesty the other pole? That doesn't fit the purpose of a M-B type test. As a result, I'm suggesting that there must be something else at the other end, which can be identified as a good quality. It becomes a bit awkward, because Honesty is so ... good sounding. There are some cases in which it can be balanced against other things, as Arnold points out. Perhaps there is a 'speak it as you see it' vs 'consider the impact of your words before speaking' axis. In that case, it isn't really 'honesty' per se that is being valued. Or it might be 'optimism vs critical evaluation'
Anyway, this discussion in even more complex form goes back at least as far as Thomas Aquinas, who suggested that every virtue had corresponding vices - at both extremes. So 'religion' - for him a virtue - could have a deficit and a surfeit. Too little was atheism, too much was superstition. The best person would be moderate in all things (which leads to the discussion of how to be moderate in moderation, and in what things moderation is no virtue, etc).
Hope that's enough grist for the mill.
Right there with you. The math underlying Big Five may be valid, but the choice of labels kills it. Who wants to be "disagreeable?" (Well, actually, psychologists spend quite a lot of their time teaching people how to be more disagreeable - or, at least, a whole lot less agreeable - because many people are so agreeable it makes them chronically unhappy.) The implicit judgments in agreeable/conscientious/neurotic/open are apparent to everyone and presumably steer the participants in answering the questions - and probably influence the wording of the questions.
It seems to me that each end of each dimension of the Big Five is actually a drawback rather than a positive. You can be too disagreeable - but also too agreeable. Too un-conscientious, but also too conscientious - or neurotic, or open.
Meters Briggs N-S remains a key difference. Abstract (iNtuitive) vs Concrete (Sensitive, specific) remains a huge personality axis understudied by pro psychologists. I’m sure the majority of the 25% or so abstract Ns go to college, and support Dems.
(90% or more of readers here are Ns, most are NTs, like me)
Dark & Light triads remain talked about among the professionals more than MBTI. For most normal folk, the 4 main, and 16 total types have a far higher Usability Index score combining accurate insights AND remembering them AND combining them. 5 has a lot more combos than 4, and 6 even more.
Naturally, most normals are more similar, while the abnormals are more uniquely abnormal (as good writers know and use.)
I would have expected that people high on the F dimension (whether NF or SF) and STs would support Dems, while NTs would not.
Personality is bunk. The false self. The ego. All useful for dealing with physical reality, but ultimately mirages leading us further from our true being.
There. That was easy.
I find that mostly or completely true of these types of personality categories. Trying to understand one's own and other's personality, especially one's own strengths and weaknesses can have benefits. I suppose these tests and categories can help with that but in my experience mostly not.
Your self-description confirms that individual personality is more complex and heterogeneous than the handful of traits in personality theory.
“I am generally low in emotionality, but I do fear physical danger”
God created men, but Samuel Colt made them equal. I’m feeble like Arnold and the introduction of firearms into my life helped to eliminate my fear of physical danger from others. The playing field got leveled so to speak.
Blessed are they who can gain this assurance. For some of us, the fear would be replaced by the fear that our impulsiveness and our fairly constant episodes of rage would make that gun go off in the third act and we would very much regret it. I guess that's fear and loathing of the self. However, the flip side of that impulsiveness and anger is that I have no fear of physical danger. Even as a woman, on the couple of occasions when menace was in play, I turned into a hellcat. I am as quick in my own defense as I am quick to anger. Now, admittedly, my husband has pointed out this is a false bravado, or rather the bravado is quite real if transient but the consequences for a 120lb. woman would be the same no matter what. But it is a small consolation when one's genetics are otherwise so damning.
Yes, I hear you, which summons a very important corollary to me from a mindfulness perspective:
Rules of Stupid: Don't go to Stupid places, with Stupid people, at Stupid times, and do Stupid things
Ah, yes - "No Be There" as my favorite show Cobra Kai puts it :-).
Except maybe under "rules of stupid" conditions or being stalked by someone violent, it's not so much a fear as reality. Then again, the exceptions might be the worst times to rely on a gun. Either way, I hope I never feel I need to carry a gun for protection from humans.