I've Got One--How About You? Looking at Personality

Gordon Allport

  A long time ago, when I was a psychology grad student, mainstream research in personality theory was based on Gordon Allport's studies on traits, the enduring dispositions we use in everyday life to describe people. Later researchers reduced thousands of descriptors to five large domains, nicknamed the "Big Five". University of California psychiatrist Samuel Barondes in Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality (FT Press, 2012) shows how to use the Five Factor Model of Personality, ie., the Big Five in thoroughly describing a person's essence.

People can demonstrate high to low levels of each of the Big Five domains. Having high or low scores in itself does not make you more or less psychologically fit.

• Extraversion: gregariousness, love of attention and excitement, assertiveness, and expression of positive emotions. Barondes uses Bill Clinton as an example of an American president high in extraversion and Barack Obama as a president low in it.
• Agreeableness: wanting to help one's group, cooperativeness, warmth, kindness. My first grade teacher was high in agreeableness. She was a well-loved by all her students, and I would do anything to win her smile. Many successful business executives, on the other hand, are low in agreeableness.
• Conscientiousness: reliable, trustworthy, organized, punctual. My father would make a dinner reservation a month in advance, confirm a day before, and show up within two minutes of the set time. Always. Jazz musicians, especially the amateurs, are low in conscientiousness and notorious for forgetting about the gig, leaving important instruments behind, drinking, and showing up improperly dressed.
• Neuroticism: feels and displays negative emotions, dysthymic, anxious, insecure. Barondes reminds us that Sigmund Freud was spurred on to success partly because of his struggles with insecurity and anxiety. But who wants to be around someone that spouts negativity all the time?
• Openness: imaginative, curious, artistic, creative. Some people enjoy the consistency of doing the same thing, day after day. Others are more daring, crave novelty, and are willing to put up with the frustrations and exhaustion connected with creative work.

Find out where you stand on the Big Five by taking a computer test created by Dr. John A. Johnson, Professor of Psychology, Penn State University. The link is here. Take the longer (300-item) version here.

(Full disclosure: I took the short test and was scored as average in everything except conscientiousness, where I was rated high. This may not be so bad. University of California, Riverside professor Howard Friedman analyzed the longitudinal data of Lewis Terman's gifted children, and found that high conscientiousness was correlated with longevity. See the meta analysis abstract here.)

There are a lot of combinations of the Big Five. If I simplify scores and assess people as either high, medium, or low in each Big Five domain, I have fifteen possible combinations and the math operation 15! equals about 307 billion possibilities. Most combinations of the Big Five are a good fit to our society, adding to a glorious rainbow of human personality. However, Barondes calls some troublesome characteristics the "Top Ten." These personality disorders can also be described through scoring on the Big Five. For example, a schizoid (extremely detached and unemotional) personality can be described as very low extraversion and a schizotypal (discomfort in relationships and eccentric behavior) can be described as low extraversion, low agreeableness, high neuroticism and high openness.

In summary, Barondes describes his techniques for examining personality:

1. Remember our common humanity and the way personalities develop.
2. Make a Big Five profile and notice what stands out.
3. Look for potentially troublesome patterns.
4. Make a moral assessment using universal and cultural standards.
5. Listen to the person's story and relate it to what you observe.
6. Integrate what you've found (P. 147).

Famous social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and fellow Stanford professor John Boyd examine personality from a philosophical perspective in The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time that will Change Your Life (Free Press, 2008). Rather than describing personality by traits, Zimbardo and Boyd look at a person's time perspective, whether she is past, present, or future-oriented in describing why people behave the way they do. Zimbardo has created two inventories, The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) (downloadable here)and the Transcendental-future Time Perspective Inventory (TFTPI) that measure

six time perspectives: two past, two present, and two future. These time perspectives are called the:

• Past-negative
• Past-positive
• present-fatalistic
• Present-hedonistic
• Future
• Transcendental-future (P.52)

People tend to be oriented towards either the past, present or future. Attitudes toward the past may be either positive or negative. Those captivated by the present may be hedonistic or fatalistic, and those planning for the future, the high-achievers among us, may never enjoy life in the here and now. Lastly, those scoring high in transcendental-future look forward to the rewards of the afterlife.
(Full disclosure: I scored high in past-positive and future.)

Studies show that the Big Five domains tend to remain stable over adulthood. Zimbardo, however, shows how one can change his ZTPI score, loosening up and enjoying being in the moment if one is too future-oriented or planning more if one is too much of a present-hedonist.

The book ends quite poetically:

Your time matters to you and, in the end, is all that matters. Time is all that you have. You might as well spend it seeking happiness and purpose--whatever they mean to you (P. 319).