Introduction into the Study of Personality
Can the theories and the science be trusted? Or is it just an elaborate storytelling? First post in the series.
I started looking into the topic of personality — or the science of how people are — like a month ago. The goal? Understand the subject better. I've learned a lot since then. How do I know? Well, I already have a post that's over 5k words and there's no end in sight. So, to avoid another behemoth that nobody can chew through — seriously, whoever finished the previous Vipassana article, kudos to you — I'll split the topic of personality into several articles.
In this post, we'll take a stroll down memory lane and I'll tell you about the various points in my life where I came in contact with some ideas about personality and what are the two big lessons that I learned. The main purpose is to fertilize the soil for the upcoming discussion and to - hopefully - make you interested in the subject.
I, for one, find it fascinating because it touches upon two essential questions that everyone asks themselves. First, why are people so different? Why is someone the life of the party and the other is a wallflower? Why does one person like poetry and the other non-fiction? But also, second, why are people so similar? Why is it that we can have one category - say extraversion - and mentally dump swaths of people into it based on what they do and how they come across?
Personally, my first exposure to something personality-like was when I first learned about Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. I think it was my girlfriend that first introduced me to it sometime in 2016. Obviously eager to impress her, I read "Gifts Differing" by Isabel and Peter Meyers. I tested as an INFP, which boosted my sense of being a special unique snowflake (according to the “data”, only a 1 - 1.5 % of males are INFPs!), and justified the feeling of not being understood by the society (INFPs are idealistic, creative, and a tad out of touch with the reality). Reading that I “tend to dwell a lot on the meaning of life”, “focus on the bigger picture rather than the nitty-gritty”, and “work better alone” was the balm for my soul. The world felt more understandable knowing I was an INFP, the sad waffle (apparently, INFPs are emotional, too).
It was a relatively short stint that I had with MBTI because a year after, I — and presumably the entire generation of young men — discovered the intellectual powerhouse, Jordan B. Peterson. I gobbled up all his content and learned that
a) Peterson doesn't like MBTI, says it's not psychometrically valid and doesn't measure consequential outcomes (like job performance); and
b) that there's the Big Five model of personality.
Following my spiritual father's teachings, I converted completely. I took his “Understand Myself” Big Five test for a few bucks, and discovered that in 2017, I was in the:
15th percentile for agreeableness. Agreeableness consists of two aspects, compassion and politeness, in which I scored in 25th, and 12th percentile, respectively.
52nd percentile for conscientiousness. Conscientiousness consists of two aspects also, industriousness and orderliness, in which I scored in the 77th percentile and 25th percentile, respectively.
72nd percentile for extraversion. Extraversion consists of two aspects, enthusiasm and assertiveness, in which I scored in 75th and 63rd percentile
26th percentile for neuroticism. Neuroticism consists of two aspects, withdrawal and volatility, in which I scored in 57th, and 9th percentile, respectively.
53rd percentile for openness to experience. Openness to experience consists of two aspects, intellect and openness, in which I scored in 28th, and 75th percentile, respectively.
Translated into normal language, that means I’m pretty disagreeable. In arguments, I would care about truth not about feelings. 52nd percentile in conscientiousness puts me squarely on the average: I get most of my shit done, but I’m far from being immune to procrastination. Relatively high extraversion means that I’m quite outgoing and seek contact with other people. I’m really low on neuroticism, which means that I’m emotionally stable, or as I’d put it: I have the range of an emotional pebble. Lastly, we have the openness factor, which is quite average for me too: I like abstract ideas and novelty, but probably not enough to become addicted (which might happen if you’re high in this factor).
The complete report is 15 pages. Feel free to look at it here - I find the descriptions quite instructive to get a feel for each of those personality dimensions. I re-read it in the course of putting this article together and I'm quite surprised at how well some of the descriptions fit me. Volatility at 9th percentile? Yep, I'm pretty mellow. Politeness at 12th? Yeah, that fits: bugger off my lawn, peasant!
But I was equally surprised at descriptions that seem to be way off the mark: how did I score high on Extraversion, and low on Intellect, a sub-aspect of the Openness to Experience, is beyond me. For the former, I always considered myself an introvert, sometimes to the point of misanthropy. And for the latter, ever since I can remember, I also enjoyed philosophy and abstract ideas. Plus, I think I can articulate my ideas somewhat clearly.
It was probably around that time that my bullshit detector started tingling.
Anyway, it was shortly after I took the assessment that I started studying psychology. In the second year, I took the module on personality. I learned the history of the field, all the way from the psychodynamic ideas of Freud, Jung, and Adler, through the behaviorist approaches of Watson and Skinner, to modern approaches based on factor analysis and lexical hypothesis.
Looking at the hodgepodge of personality theories out there, I learned two important lessons. First: things always make sense if you think within the bounds of a theory or a framework. For instance, you can read about Adler's ideas about how personality is shaped by parenting styles and whether one is given enough space to develop courage (and not a sense of inferiority), and it will make sense.
Looking through the lens of the Adlerian framework, you begin to see how the absence of your father in your early childhood might have affected your development. You'll be also able to explain why you create co-dependent relationships — because you haven't grown courageous enough.
Similarly, you can take a look at Watson's idea that a personality is basically an amalgamation of all the various habits that we've acquired over the years, and again, things will make sense. Most of what we do on the daily basis is habitual. Some studies estimate over 40%1 of our behaviors every day are based on habit. Habits layer on one another, too. For instance, the resulting behavior of one habit might serve as a cue for another. A simple example: closing Twitter makes you open Instagram, then Reddit, etc. (you can insert your own patterns here). Further, habits are triggered by environmental cues. If you assume that your everyday environment doesn't change much — you go to work at a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time, go back home at a certain time, workout at a certain time, chill at a certain time, and go to bed a certain time — Watsonian notion of personality consisting of different habits isn't all that far fetched now, isn't it?
It became clear to me that theories — at least within personality literature, let's not overgeneralize here — are basically storytelling devices. Sure, they might become more sophisticated as our tools improve, but ultimately they try to tell a story of how people are. These stories are, like everything else, guided by the cultural paradigm of the times. Case in point: is it surprising that Freud came up with the idea of unconscious sexual drives, in the prim, sexually repressive environment guided by Victorian values? I don’t think so. Now the next question is, is it because we developed better theories that nobody diagnoses women with hysteria anymore, or is it because our cultural values shifted, and with it our perception of how we come to interpret the reality?2
Since “personality” isn't grounded in something substantive and material, we will always deal with stories. And stories are, well, stories. So, keep that in mind when you work with any (personality) framework.
The second lesson I learned is this: whether you think a theory3 is valid is largely guided by your intuition (and that happens even if you look at the research behind it, by the way. The intuition then might just be more scientifically informed, but still an intuition).
We can distinguish two kinds of intuition. First, is the “mainstream” intuition, with the following reasoning: the notions of personality have developed over the years. Each theory has - more or less - supplanted the previous one. And so it makes sense to assume that the current notions of personality are the pinnacle of research. The ruthless evolution weeded out the ideas that couldn't adapt to the scientific scrutiny. And the strongest — or the most adaptable to the circumstances — have survived to impregnate all our minds. I think this is fair to assume and a decent epistemic standard to strive to.
Of course, you can also be more of the “hipster” intuition and either scavenge for all the fringe ideas of personality that the field has all but ignored. Or you take a temporal jump and see whether the theories back then have some validity. That's, of course, assuming that the field hasn't only progressed, or that it hasn't done a good job selecting the theories that best fit the data. I think this is also fair: progress is a relative thing. Was it progress that we developed agriculture and with it, civilizations and smartphones? Perhaps. But it also might be that we were actually happier in our ancestral environments, plucking fruits, hunting fishes, weaving baskets for a few hours a day, and chilling for the rest of it4.
These two realizations, that things always make sense within the bounds of a theory, and that whether you subscribe to a theory is guided largely by your intuition, shook the foundations of how I look at personality. I became disenchanted with the field. The resulting skepticism made it difficult for me to subscribe to any framework since, however elaborate, any theory was only a story, a device to make people understand something beyond their grasp.
I noticed, though, that it's all too easy to simply dismiss everything as nonsense, especially in psychology. The reason? Humans, psychology’s subject matter, is too complex. As a result, we don’t deal in facts, but probabilities. And our probabilities are way, way cruder than those of other disciplines. In other words, it’s hard to establish the truth.
Regardless, this — and the following posts — is the attempt at dealing with that complexity. I want to know whether we can — despite the irksomeness of the subject matter — approximate some answers about the human character based on the science that investigates it. To do so, we'll look at the basis of modern, factor analytic approaches to personality — the lexical hypothesis, which assumes we can excavate human personality from the vocabulary that we use. We will also explore factor analysis, the statistical tool that's widely employed in the research and that, one might say, is paradigmatic to the entire modern notion of personality traits. Lexical hypothesis and factor analysis gave birth to many personality theories over the years, but the one that's the most prominent is the Big Five, which you’ve glimpsed already. We’ll take a closer look at the theory itself, how it came to exist, and what are its contributions.
Having established the basis — lexical hypothesis, factor analysis, and Big Five — we will then critically assess the verisimilitude (truth-likeness) of the entire paradigm. Right now, my personal jury is still out and I'm not sure which conclusion will I draw. But first things first: Next week, we'll start by exploring the lexical hypothesis.
Until then.
By the way, if you see a claim about how much of the behavior we do daily is habitual, try to look for the source. By my estimate, over 90% of these claims stem from this one study from the early 2000s by Wood & Kashy, which makes me wonder - is this a settled matter? With one study? Something’s strange here.
The idea that we often invent things (here, mental disorders) that aren’t actually there comes from here: Book Review: Crazy Like Us - by Scott Alexander (substack.com)
you can insert “story” instead of “theory” here if you feel especially cheeky
For a book with this premise, I recommend: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress.