The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 149: The Psychology of Personality

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

An introduction to the psychological study of personality, beginning with a definition of what is and is not personality and a brief history of the development of the field from Freud and Jung through the Myers-Briggs Indicator and the modern trait theories. I then discuss the Big Five personality traits, covering openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, along with validation and criticisms of this model. I conclude with a brief discussion of values and narrative identity as additional aspects of personality.  If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a PayPal donation or becoming a Patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 149, the psychology of personality. I'm your host, James Fodor. So, in this episode, we're going to talk about personality psychology. We're going to discuss what is the definition of personality, so what are we talking about here, and then give a bit of a history of different theories of personality. So we'll talk a bit about Freud, Jung, Adler, and Maslow, some of the older figures, not very much detail, but that acts as a prelude to talking about modern theories of personality. So particularly trait theories, and we'll focus on the big five personality characteristics,

and talk a little bit about values and narrative identity as well. No recommended pre-listing for this episode. It's kind of standalone. So, without further ado, let's get started and begin by talking about what is the definition of personality in personality psychology. Well, the APA Dictionary defines personality as, quote, the enduring configuration of characteristics and behavior that comprises an individual's unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-conceptibilities, and emotional

pattern. End quote. Now, since this definition is incredibly vague, and since there's not really a single standard accepted definition that's any more specific than that, in this introduction section, I'm just going to talk a bit about what differentiates personality from other areas of psychology. So we can understand a bit about what personality is by talking about what it isn't. So the way that I'm going to characterize personality psychology in this episode is that it is the study of individual psychological human differences. And that helps us to understand a number

of contrasts. So personality psychology isn't cross-cultural psychology. I mean, of course you can look at cross-cultural differences in personality, right? But in itself, it's not a study of how personality psychology is not a study of the differences in psychology across cultures rather it's an attempt to study differences between individuals whether within or across cultures so it's in its differences at an individual rather than a cultural level personality is not cognition it's not cognitive psychology so cognition is usually thought of as capabilities that relate to processing information so like memory problem solving numerical and spatial reasoning things like that some definitions will include differences in cognition, and we'll talk about that a bit in a moment, but in general,

I would separate those out and therefore focus personality on differences in dispositions and interests and motivations and emotional patterns, things like that. So things that are not cognition, because cognition kind of has its own distinct area of psychology. Personality is also distinct from emotion. So I mentioned that personality does relate to patterns of emotion or tendencies to feel or display emotions in a certain way, but personality isn't the same as emotion as such. Emotions are transient states that are responses to some stimulus. Personality is more enduring and it refers to someone's underlying dispositions. So you experience emotions, you don't experience personality, you have a personality, right? So the most central component of personality that contemporary psychology focuses on are called

personality traits. So a trait is a more or less consistent, enduring disposition. that's manifest in things like patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And they're measured using standard personality psychological trait scales, which we'll talk about a bit more in a moment. So this idea of a trait is very important, and it refers, as I was saying, to a fairly general and persistent disposition. So it's sort of a way that you tend to think, a way that you tend to feel, a way that you tend to act. And it needs to have some amount of constancy or stability across time and also

across contexts. So that's something else that differentiates personality psychology, say, from social psychology. Social psychology predominantly focuses on differences in human behavior that are elicited by the context humans are in or the social environment, whereas personality psychology focuses on differences between people that are in some sense internal to that. person. Now, of course, personality is shaped by your experiences in life, but the idea is that the differences are attributable to some somewhat stable and somewhat consistent differences across contexts. Personality does allow for interactions with the environment, of course, but personality does require some kind of stability across context or constancy across context.

Otherwise, you're just talking about the situation itself and not the actual personality that involves traits that are constant and that the person has across contexts. So in addition to traits, personality also includes motivations and values, as I mentioned before. And you can think of these as internal states that drive behavior and are affected by the underlying traits. So I mentioned a bit earlier that I think that it's unhelpful to incorporate cognition into as part of personality. Some researchers do include skills as a component of personality. That was mentioned in the APA definition that I ran out before. But I think that this is a bit of a confusion personally.

So I think it's better to think of skills as describing individual differences in cognitive or other capabilities, rather than as individual personality differences. Skills are capabilities that are learned, and usually they're specific to certain tasks or types of tasks. Whereas personality traits and also personality values, they're not really taught in the same way. I mean, you can change your personality over time, and that can be responsive to learning. But you don't, you teach someone skills, you don't really teach them a personality or teach them to change them. personality in quite the same way. And also personality traits and values are much more stable across contexts, whereas skills are often quite specific to particular functions or particular tasks. So I don't really think it makes sense to lump skills in with traits and values in the same

way. But you should bear in mind that some people do include that as a component of personality. Now, a final component or aspect of personality that I've mentioned briefly is this idea of narrative identity. And narrative identity is less well characterized, but the idea is that a person's narrative identity refers to the story or set of stories that someone believes about themselves and their life. So it includes things like their role in society and how they relate to their friends and families, who they are as a person, how they make sense of themselves and their role in the world, things like that. And usually it's in some sort of narrative form or a set of narratives. So in this episode, we're going to regard personality as essentially the sum

of individual traits plus values plus narrative identity. So those three things are what I'm considering to make up a personality. And we'll spend most of our time talking about traits because they are thought to be perhaps the more fundamental of the three, though that's debatable. But certainly they're the most well-characterized and we have more to say about them. But I do think it's important to emphasize that personality is more than just personality trades. It's certainly more than just the big five, which we will get to.

Okay, so that concludes our introductory description of what personality is. Now, as I mentioned, I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of personality psychology, just to give a bit of background. I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but personality psychology originated in, or at least one of the sources of modern personality psychology is in sort of the great theorists of the late 19th through early 20th centuries. and they tended to postulate grand unifying theories that were supposed to be applicable to sort of all persons across the world, I think, was the idea. And so the most well-known of this is Freud.

So he developed psychoanalysis theories of your eid ego and super ego, edipus complex, repression, defense mechanisms and stages of psychosexual development. I'm not going to describe what those are here. It would take a whole episode in and of itself. And honestly, I don't understand all of them very well, especially the stages of psychosexual. sexual development and it's questionable whether that is really scientific. That's also somewhat debated. However, it is important to have some notion of where Freud and some of the others I'm about to mention fit into the story here. So if you don't know what those things are, don't worry too much about them, but many people have heard of psychoanalysis and the idea of

repression and defense mechanisms. In particular, those ideas have entered into the sort of popular zeitgeist, if you like. Many of the other ideas of these early theorists have also been very influential, both in and outside the academy. So Jung is another of these thinkers. So he developed the idea of the collective unconscious, as well as archetypes and ideas of individuation. Adler developed ideas about community belonging and founded the idea at the School of Individual Psychology, and he studied effects of birth order on personality. And he originated the idea of the inferiority complex, which is another idea that's very much entered the popular consciousness. And finally, Maslow, so he is the originator of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which again, many

people know about and was a founder of humanistic psychology and also theorized about peak experiences. So these and other thinkers, people like Freud, Jung Adler and Maslow and others, developed and sort of worked on these sort of grand theories, which, you know, had questionable input from empirical studies. It's certainly much less than psychology does today. and it's questionable, as I said, to the extent that any of these ideas are very scientific, although they are interesting.

As one recent review article explained, quote, the grand theorists of the past, such as Freud Jung Adler, Roger Skinner, and others, were set aside in favour of more pragmatic models that would guide research programs but would not make sweeping or untestable assumptions about human nature, end of quote. So this is talking about a shift in psychology that happens sort of around the 1960s, alongside the cognitive revolution in sort of cognitive science that moved away from behaviorism. In sort of personal and personality psychology, there was a shift towards more sort of focused, grounded, narrow, and empirically based research programs moving away from

these grand theories. So I'm going to mention them and highlight their importance. If you look at some books on psychology, they devote a lot more time to these, but I'm not going to discuss them in further detail here. However, I do want to address one kind of offshoot of some of these grand theories, particularly Carl Jung, and that is the Myers-Briggs-type indicator, or MBTI, it's sometimes called. So this is a personality questionnaire. It's by far the most popular personality questionnaire. It's estimated that 50 million people worldwide have taken one of these tests, although I don't really know how they factor in all the other people who take internet versions of them. But I think that those internet versions are not actually official ones,

because the Myers-Briggs-Type Indicator test is administered by the Myers-Briggs Foundation, and they make quite a lot of money off that and you're not allowed to use that without permission. So I don't know if the online ones are actually official. Anyway, the point is that many people have heard of this and it's very well entrenched in popular consciousness. This test was developed by an American education scholar called Catherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers during the Second World War. It was based on Carl Jung's ideas that he described and developed in his book's psychological

types. So it's based on Jungian theory, but with some of their own ideas. The basic idea of the Myersbriggs type indicator is that there are four binary categorical variables. So there's introversion, extroversion, sensing intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. I won't try to explain exactly what all those things mean. Introversion, extraversion may be the most familiar because that's also one of the traits in the big five. We'll talk about that later. But the idea is that on each of these binary categories, you were assigned one of those two types.

so introvert or extrovert, sense, or intuition, and so forth. And all of the different combinations of these four categories, so it's 2 by 2 by 2 by 2, that gives you 16 overall types, right? And that's why it's called a type indicator, because there are 16 of these types based on the categorization of these four different variables. And so a single letter from each of the categories is used to denote uniquely one of the 16 types, and so they're given a four-letter string, so INFP or ESTJ and so forth.

So if you've heard people talk about these sort of acronyms starting with an I or and E, that's what they're talking about, there's these MBTIs, these type indicators. This system, as I said, was developed during the 1940s, and it was popularized largely in the private sector and education during the 60s and 70s in America and spread around the world from there. The test is promoted and sold by the Myers-Briggs Foundation, It's still very influential in business, education, and in popular culture. However, it has had very little impact in academia.

For example, I read through three main review articles on personality psychology to prepare this episode, as well as bits and pieces of other sources. None of these three articles even mentioned MBTI at all, despite being quite lengthy in covering many other aspects. So that gives you an indication that the MySpace type indicator really doesn't have any influencing the academy, and it's widely considered to be non-scientific. So there are a number of problems with the Myersburg type indicator. Probably the single largest one is that it artificially dichotomizes what are really continuous trait variables. So introversion extroversion, for example,

is not a binary trait. It's a spectrum. It's continuous, right? And it doesn't really make sense to just arbitrarily dichotomize it like that. In fact, many of these traits are going to be normally distributed or roughly normally distributed, which means most people are going to sort of middling values of the trait. And so splitting it down the middle really doesn't make very much sense. You're just splitting the population into two halves when most people are near the near the cut off anyway. So that's a very strange thing to do and it's not really well motivated. So another major problem is that the four trait variables have not been arrived at through any empirical analysis of data like has been the case for the big five, which we'll talk about in a moment.

And I don't know entirely how they arrived at, presumably through analysis of Jung's ideas, but there's not really any good reason to accept them over any other arbitrary set of four different traits. As a result of these two factors, it's found that the test-retest reliability of the MBTI is quite low, which means basically if you get the same person to do the same test twice, how often do they find themselves with the same type indicator? The reliability are quite low, and one of the main reasons for that is because many people are very close to the cutoff between the two types, because they're near the middle, right? And so maybe one time they answer slightly to one side, the other time slightly to the other side,

and so there's a lot of flipping between categories. And so this just makes it a very poor psychometric test. And this plus the sort of very dubious way that it was developed by someone who didn't have any particular expertise in personality, psychology, and wasn't really subject to academic peer review and replication and things like that, it's not been well validated. It's not really considered to be scientific. That doesn't mean it's totally useless. So any psychometric test like this that does get you to ask, that does get participants

to report their experiences and their characteristics is likely to have some useful information that differentiates people. So there isn't zero information in the MBTI type. It's just that there are much better ways of measuring personality. And so in the rest of this episode, we're going to focus on those. So let's move then to talk about traits. Remember that at the outset I said that here we're going to regard personality as traits plus values plus narrative identity. And of those traits are the best characterized.

So let's move on to talk about those a bit more in general and then we'll talk about the big five. So as I said at the outset, a personality trait is a stable disposition to think, feel and behave in a certain way. Stable meaning across time and also across contexts. Personality psychology operationalizes each trait as a single dimension that you can measure separately from other traits. So each trait is measured by a number, like a continuous number, and you can measure that number corresponding to one trait separately from other traits. The idea of this theory is that a combination of some relatively small number of traits taken together can be used to characterize fairly completely someone's personality, or at least

set of personality traits, which differentiates them relative to others in a population. So personality traits aren't supposed to completely describe a human being. They're supposed to describe aspects of human beings that differ systematically within a population. and also that are aspects that are relatively stable across time and across contexts. So in this way, personality traits are not just sort of anything that makes people different. There's fairly strict criteria about what would be sufficient to establish something as a trait, although even there, there's still, of course, plenty of room for debate about exactly what the best set of traits is, as we'll see in a moment.

It's important to distinguish a trait from a state. I mentioned this a little earlier, but a trait is an underlying disposition that is stable, over time and across context, at least reasonably so, whereas a state is transitory and is specific to a given context. So a good example of a state is an emotional state, right? You can be happy or sad because of specific stimuli in different contexts, but a trait would be a disposition to be emotional, for example, or to be not emotional expressives, or to be extroverted, or to be loud, or something like that. So that's a difference between a trait and a state. So anyone can be in a particular state in a given context, but what different are you?

differentiates personality types is the trait that you have that characterizes how you tend to be cross contexts. And for decades, there's a sort of dispute between, to an extent, between personality psychologists on the one hand and social psychologists on the other hand. Personality psychologists tend to emphasize the stable traits that differentiate people from each other as being important for describing behavior, whereas social psychologists tend to emphasize the unique aspects of a situation that affect the way people behave. If you listen to the episode Disturbing Social Psychology Experiment, so in that episode I mostly described aspects of the situation that affect people's behavior. In this episode, we're looking at aspects of someone's internal traits and other parts of personality that affect their behaviors.

But of course, both are important, and it's really an empirical question as to exactly how important each are traits versus situations. Traits are measured by psychometric tests. So these tests involve asking respondents to provide self-reports based on real situations or hypothetical situations or self-descriptions of how they tend to be. You can also get someone to report on someone else, and so this is a way of cross-checking, and generally results are that people's reports of themselves correlate quite highly with other people's reports of them, like people who know them, family and friends, but so typically we just ask people to self-report.

So obviously you can only get reliable data if people are being honest. But there's a fair amount of evidence that indicates people are usually pretty honest about this, at least on average. Okay, so that's a basic introduction to the idea of traits and how they're measured. Now I'm going to talk about the Big Five. It's a little bit of a pretentious name perhaps. I'm not entirely sure where the notion of Bigger comes from. Five comes from, of course, the fact that there are five of them. So the idea, remember here, is that these traits,

are supposed to be measurable on a scale using a psychometric test. They are validated by the fact that they're supposed to be reliably measurable over repeated measures of the same test and also variations of the exact wording of the questions and things like that. And there are other measures as well that we can use to validate why these specific five. So first, before we get to those, I'll explain what the five traits are. And then we'll talk a bit more about the validation and why we should accept these five as being particularly important. And then as we'll see, we'll talk about some criticisms of the Big Five and some limitations. But first, let's understand what these traits are. So the Big Five taxonomy organizes traits into five broad domains. So it's perhaps

even not quite right to think of these as distinct traits because there is in fact many what are called facets. So there are like some components of each trait. So there's sort of internal differentiation. There's also some correlation between each of the five. So it's a bit more messy than just five independent numbers, but at least as a starting point, we'll talk about them as if they're kind of independent. So five broad domains, and these are extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, or neuroticism, and openness to experience. So a useful acronym you can use to remember these is ocean, so that's openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Earlier I said emotional stability or neuroticism. Neuroticism really refers

to emotional instability, but some people flip it and talk about emotional stability, because the other traits are all kind of framed in a more positive connotation, or extra versions debatable, but like openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness are all positively connoted words in general, and so people sometimes phrase neuroticism as reversed and talk about emotional stability. But just be aware of that, but for the ocean acronym, neuroticism is used. Anyway, so those are the words. What do they mean? Well, let me go through and talk about what each trade is supposed to refer to, talk about some of the facets like the sub-components within the trait, and I'll give you some of the examples of questions that are used to measure someone's

positioning on that trade, or the value of that trait. So let's start with openness to experience. So openness is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, strange and unusual ideas, use of imagination, curiosity, variety of experiences. So people who are open tend to be intellectually curious, soaked into emotional experiences, beauty, willing to try new things. They tend to be unpredictable and perceived as lacking focus. They're more likely to engage in risky behavior, taking drugs, things like that. People with low openness tend to be more persevering and pragmatic, data-driven, practical, and sometimes perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded. People with high openness tend to have very wide interests, tend to have artistic interest, tend to be very imaginative

and excitable. So examples of question items on the psychometric quiz, you might be asked, do you think of yourself as someone who is original, comes up with ideas? Do you think of yourself as someone who values artistic, aesthetic experiences? Do you think of yourself as someone who has an active imagination? So the more of those sorts of questions you answer yes to, or actually, they tend to be ranked on the like-ard scale, like from one to seven or something, so you rank them between like strongly disagree and strongly agree. So the high you score on these sorts of questions, the higher you're going to score on the openness trait. Okay, let's talk about conscientiousness.

So conscientiousness refers essentially to self-discipline. So people who are high in conscientiousness strive for achievement to exceed expectations. They have high levels of impulse control, regulation, self-direction. They can be perceived as being stubborn and highly focused because of this. Conversely, low conscientiousness is associated with being flexible, spontaneousity, but can also appear sloppy, poorly, motivated, not very reliable. So people who are highly conscientious score highly on facets like cobblest. competence, dutifulness, drive for achievement and self-discipline.

And some of the question items that relate to conscientiousness include, are you someone who sees yourself as doing a thorough job? Are you someone who tends to be lazy? So that's reverse scored, so the lower you score on that, then the higher your conscientiousness is. Are you someone who does things efficiently? So these are some of the example items. Next one is extraversion.

So extraversion, I think this is probably one of the most misunderstood of the items, because So extraversion, introversion doesn't primarily relate to whether you like to socialize with other people or not. There's sort of an aspect of that in it, but that's not quite right. Because introverts like to socialize as well, but it's a little different. So extraversion is more marked by engagement with the external world and interacting energetically, enthusiastically and assertively with other people. So extroverts tend to be more dominant in social settings.

They put themselves forward. They assert themselves. They're highly visible in a group. They talk a lot. Whereas introverts tend to have lower energy and lower dominance in a social context. They need less stimulation from other people, and they prefer to spend more time alone than extroverts do. So there is a lower level of social engagement, but that's not necessarily the primary difference. So facets of this trait are things like gregariousness, assertiveness, activity or energeticness,

adventurousness, how much you seek excitement and warmth and outgoingness. Examples of items for extroversion are you see yourself as someone who is taught, talkative, is outgoing or sociable, or do you see yourself as someone who is reserved? So that's reverse code. So the next one is agreeableness. So agreeableness is a general concern for social harmony. Highly agreeable individuals value getting along with other people, so they're considerate, kind, generous, tend to be trusting and trustworthy, helpful of others, willing to compromise their

own interests, and are concerned about hurting or upsetting other people. Disagreable individuals tend to place their own self-interest above getting along with others, So they're less concerned with others' well-being, less likely to put themselves out for other people. They can also be seen as more competitive or challenging or just argumentative, untrustworthy or disagreeable. Some of the facets related to this are things like trust, altruism, modesty versus being a show-off, degree of sympathy, and also compliant. So agreeable people tend to be more compliant, more willing to go along with what others say, and less willing to be explicitly disagreeable or be the odd one out. So some examples of questions, of question items here. So do you see someone who is rude to others? So that's reverse score. So that is lower, associated with lower agreeableness. Do you see yourself

as someone who is forgiving by nature? Do you see yourself as someone who is considerate and kind? The last trait, neuroticism or emotional instability. So neuroticism is a tendency to have strong negative emotions. So anger, anxiety, depression, things like that. People who are high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive, vulnerable to stress. They're more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening and as a result tend to have worse psychological well-being overall so they're more prone to mental illness. People who have low neuroticism are more emotionally stable, they're harder to upset, less emotionally reactive, tend to be calm and free from persistent negative feelings. So some of the facets here are anxiety, irritability,

depression, impulsiveness and lack of self-confidence. So examples of questions here are do you see yourself as someone who worries a lot, gets nervous easily, or do you see yourself as someone who is relaxed and handles stress well? Again, that's reverse score. So hopefully that gives you an idea of the five traits and what they're supposed to refer to. Now, let's just give a bit more background and explain a bit more about the big five and why it's used and some of the validations. So the five traits were originally developed from a lexical study of English adjectives describing personality. So this was begun with a collection of about 17,000 words, which was over time progressively consolidated into fewer and fewer, eventually

resulting in five main axes of the personality traits. Later work that built on this used peer ratings of other people to respond to questions like those that I have just been talking about, and the results were analyzed using a technique called factor analysis. So this is a statistical methods that's used to identify key dimensions of variation in a dataset. And they identify five important factors, which they identified as being sufficiently similar to the lexical study items. And since then, the model has sort of been built on, and many studies have validated the Big Five model in different populations, in different countries around the world. So there was a study known as the Big Five inventory, which was administered in 56 nations using 28

different languages. Obviously, you have to appropriately translate the different terminology and personality adjectives in to different languages, but the results are generally quite robust across different cultures, and generally there is strong support for the conceptual validity of the five separate factors. The Big Five personality traits are highly stable across time. It's found that they are most changeable in the late teens through early 20s, so young adulthood, and by late 20s, they tend to stabilize and change very little thereafter. That doesn't mean they don't change at all or can't change as a result of life experiences, but they just tend to be very stable on average throughout

adulthood. A recent meta-analysis that I sought from 243 retest coefficients for personality traits found that the average correlation between trade scores over a 15-year interval was about 0.6, or if you were just for correcting for reliability of the fact that, even over the short term, the measures aren't completely reliable. The correlation over time, goes up to about 0.75 or so, meaning that even over very long intervals of time, people's personality traits are really quite stable and don't change very much. That being said, personality traits are changeable in response to life events. They're not completely fixed. So taking up leadership positions has been found to result in an increase in extroversion,

whereas negative life experiences tend to result in increases in neuroticism. Receiving more support from family members during adolescence is associated with increases in agreeableness. Overseas travel has been associated with increases in openness and a decrease in neuroticism. So there are effects like this of life experiences. It's just that on average people's personality doesn't change much from the late 20s onwards. There are some gender differences in personality, so the Big Five inventory that I mentioned over 56 different nations found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion agreeableness and conscientiousness, with the biggest and most consistent difference being

in neuroticism, with significant differences being found in 49 of the 56 nations surveyed. Interestingly, there's also evidence that personality traits, including many of the big five, so extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, are reliably measured in chimpanzees as rated by their carers. So what they do is they get different carers or people responsible for looking after the chimpanzees to rate personalities of individual chimpanzees and correlate them with each other, and that's found to be the result in reliable ratings for at least a number of these personality traits. And you would expect that, because humans obviously have a very recent shared evolutionary

heritage with chimpanzee, so you would expect there to be some psychological continuity in terms of underlying personality traits. Now, one point of dispute is in the relative importance or priority given to the broad traits, so that's the big five themselves, versus the more narrow facets of the traits. So I mentioned the facets when I was talking before. For example, agreeableness is the main trait, or the broad trait, but it has component facets, including trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty. and sympathy. So they're all kind of connected to each other, but they're all a bit distinct, and you can score high in one facet, but lower in the others. So they tend to be correlated.

And so there's a question about which of them is sort of more fundamental or more important. And a lot of research has demonstrated that individual facets tend to be more reliable and predictive of performance or life outcomes than the broad trait itself, which kind of makes sense, essentially, because you're being more specific when you talk about one facet. You're dealing with items that are more closely related and tightly clustered to each other, whereas each of the five traits is broader. And yes, the facets within a trait tend to be correlated with each other, but they're not perfectly correlated, and there is more sort of spread across them. So there is some dispute about how much we should focus on the traits versus the facets within the traits.

Now, there's also, of course, if you have a big five set of traits, then everyone wants to, you know, add a sixth trait or additional traits to that. And there have been many proposals over the use to add additional factors to the Big Five. The most widely accepted sixth trait is honesty, which is included in an alternative model called the Hexico model as a sixth factor. The Hexico differs from the Big Five in some other ways. They restructure some of the facets as well. And some people have argued this is a better model than the Big Five, but there's still debate about that. And there doesn't seem to be overall a lot of agreement. One problem with adding too many additional factors is that you increase the complexity of the model without necessarily increasing

the predictive power or the validity. Additional traits might be highly correlated with existing traits, which doesn't really offer much additional predictive value. So you want to ensure that you have some reason to add additional traits that you're not just sort of duplicating information that's already contained in the Big Five. And you want to make sure that whatever the traits are that you're proposing are conceptually distinct, that they're getting at something different. As an example, there was quite a bit of attention paid a few years ago to the idea of grit, which was sort of like determination and steadfastness. This was supposed to be predictive of performance in employment and other life pursuit contexts. And it turns out that quite a lot of the early research on

grit was not well conducted. And subsequent research has indicated that the notion of grit is so closely correlated with and so similar to conscientiousness that it's not really worth considering as a separate factor. Maybe it's described slightly differently, but it's pretty much the same thing as conscientiousness. So just because you give it a new name and kind of a fancy new description, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually different. You have to be able to demonstrate that it's conceptually distinct and distinctive and separately predictive. It can explain different variants than is explained by an existing factor. Nonetheless, there are still many proposals. So I'll just list some of the traits that have been argued should be considered

as additional traits. So honesty is one that I mentioned before. There's an interpersonal broad trait, which would include facets, things like folksiness, supportiveness, degree of prejudice, reciprocal altruism. There's also intropersonal types of traits. So facets include ease of decision making, egotism, emotionality, heroism, narcissism, need for rules or supervision, tolerance for contradiction. So there are quite a lot of things that people have proposed as adding to the five-factor model, but none have really gained wide acceptance yet.

And honesty probably will be the closest. to that, or honestly humility it's sometimes described as. So just to summarize there, the big five factor is widely accepted as a very useful explanatory device. The five factors have been quite widely validated across many different countries and people's ratings are highly reliable in terms of if you repeat tests, it's very reliable over individual repeats and even over long periods of time, they're highly reliable. Different traits have been shown to be predictive.

of performance or outcomes in certain fields. So conscientiousness is a very reliable predictor of performance in many workplace contexts. Neurodicism is very predictive of mental health difficulties, unsurprisingly. Interestingly, extroversion tends to be very highly associated with positive affect and then high mood. So extroverts tend to be much happier generally than introverts, which is interesting. Some research that I've seen there indicates that it's related, it may be related to the social dominance aspect, essentially that extroverts tend to be more forthright, more energetic, and they put themselves in a sort of dominant and attention-seeking sort of position, which is something that, you know, generally speaking, humans find to be rewarding,

whereas introverts tend not to do that or tend to find that difficult or stressful, and so they don't get that sort of positive feedback. I don't know that that's the full explanation, but that's an idea that I've seen. Openness to experience, as I mentioned, is predictive of things like experimenting with drugs or artistic interests. So there's many uses that people put to these. Now, I should say that some employers like to use personality tests. They tend to use the MBTI more so than the Big Five, but there are some who like to use those to screen potential employees.

This usage is not really appropriate or recommended by at least most researchers. The Big Five are not designed to be used for testing for job. aptitude. Contientiousness obviously does have some predictivity there, but there are other ways to test that. I mean, you can just look at someone's grades. School performance correlates very highly with conscientiousness as well as intelligence, so that's actually probably a better way to look if you're interested in that. Generally, the Big Five are designed to describe human variation. It's not designed as an employment tool. And apart from conscientiousness, I'm not really aware of strong predictive utility for the rest of the Big Five. It's going to really depend on the type of job that you do. And in fact, there's research that I've seen that indicates that people cluster based on personality traits quite strongly into different professions, which is really not at all surprising that introverted versus extroverted people or open versus less open people or agreeable versus less agreeable people tend to cluster into different types of careers. So it's true that your personality might tell you something about what type of career is likely to be a good fit for you, but it's unlikely

that the Big Five is going to tell you anything there that you don't already know just by kind of thinking about what sort of work and environment is appealing to you. So I don't really think this usage of personality tests is scientifically validated or is really that useful. I think it's better to just think about what things that are interesting to you and pursue those. And if that is affected by your personality, well, so be it. That's all well and good, but doing a personality test isn't really going to help you there. And in terms of predicting performance, the most predictive type of task to give someone is to just give them an example of the work or a task that's as close as possible to what they will actually be doing and to see how well they do at that.

That's the best way to assess someone's likely performance. And if you want a general metric that measures intelligence and conscientiousness, then school grades are a very good measure of that. So before we conclude, I do want to say something about the other two components of personality. So remember at the start I said that for our purposes here, we're going to think of personality as traits plus values plus narrative of identity. So we've talked extensively about traits. I'll just talk a little bit now about values and narrative identity. So value, or sometimes it's talked about in terms of motivation, but I'm going to use the term

value here, covers a fairly wide range of phenomena. So this includes drives toward achievement or attaining life goals or attaining power, social achievement, anything that sort of drives people to accomplish something or attain something. This is what we mean by values, things that are important to you. Major life goals and values have also been measured to be just as consistent as personality traits when you measure them over comparable time intervals. So again, there's this constancy over time that's important for personality. values can change with changing life circumstances. So, for example, new mothers have been found to increase their goals relating to family and health and decrease their achievement, career-related aspirations, which is maybe not entirely surprising.

And one of the things about values is that it's typically thought, this is subject to debate, but the idea is typically that traits are more fundamental. And then a person's underlying traits plus the circumstances that they're in, then shape their values and motivations, which in turn affected the, in fact their behaviors and the decisions that they make. So an example could be that you may have a set of personality traits, which initially leads you to pursue a career, for example, as a value. But then when you start a family, maybe that change in circumstances triggers a somewhat of a shift in your values towards building a family, just as an example. So values can change not because your underlying

traits have changed, but because the circumstances in which you kind of exercise or manifest those traits have changed, and so you focus on different things. So the idea of values is that they're a kind of a way of, as I said, manifesting or directing the traits that you have. So your sort of underlying tendencies, the traits that you have are then manifested in the characteristic adaptations that you demonstrate in a particular context. And so those are largely described by values, as well as things like your interests and your relationships with other people. But broadly, you can characterize those as values, what you care about, what you think is important. And the last component then of personality is narrative identity.

So scholar called McAdams has written about this, and his idea of identity is that individuals use narratives of their personal past experiences to construct a sense of who you are as an agent in the world. Right. So you're sort of telling a story about who you are as a person acting in the world in relation to other people. And people do that by sort of reflecting on their motives and drives and their goals. So they think about like, who am I, what's important to me and how do I situate myself

relative to other people in my social context. So narrative identity, as you might gather, is more concrete and it's more time-bound, so it tends to change more, obviously because your life develops, right? So the narrative continues. It's more changeable than values or traits. And more qualitative, so it's quite descriptive. It's not really quantitative, like you can measure a trait and you can, to some extent, measure values, like how important are different things to people.

But narrative identity is very descriptive. And it's very grounded in individual. personal experiences. So obviously narratives will have anecdotes and stories in them from your own life, as well as a structuring to make sense of them. So there are some research frameworks that have been developed to study narrative identity. It's not really well developed by a psychometric questionnaire. One technique is the psychobiography of famous people. So this involves essentially a psychologist analyzing the life of a famous person, often famous politicians or sometimes scientists, and sort of reflecting on what psychological traits and values shaped this person's life and

how they saw themselves over time. Obviously, that's somewhat interpretive to do that, but it can be a useful way to understand them as persons a bit better or what drove them to do what they did. Another technique that's used is to get people to tell stories about their own lives and then to code certain features, so looking at certain descriptive terms or certain ideas that come up repeatedly. And so this can yield interesting insights about how people think about themselves and what differentiates that. The narrative content of those sorts of stories has been shown to be useful in predicting outcomes in certain cases of therapy and in mental illness. So there are

certain uses of that. But that sort of research is in much earlier stages, certainly compared to trait theory. But it's thought to be an important aspect of personality as well, how someone regards and describes themselves. And the idea is that that kind of builds on. someone's values. So basically the idea is trades plus the external circumstances that someone is in in life determines their values and interests. And those together then shape their self-concept in combination with the particular events that they've had in their life. So that brings me to the conclusion of today's episode. Hopefully you found this interesting. If so, you can support the show by giving a favorable review on Spotify or iTunes or the

aggregator of your choice. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or ask a question or give any other feedback, you can contact me at Fods12.gm.com. That's FODS12 at gmail.com. If you would like to support the show financially, you can make a one-off donation via PayPal. Just use my email from before. Or you can become a supporter via Patreon. So thanks very much, everyone, for listening. I'll talk to you next time.