“ALL MY PERSONALITIES SAY ‘HI’!”
— — do you identify with the Big Five traits?
How do you characterize youself? There are tons of words in English (and in other languages) used in order to describe a person compared to, for example, a group of other people (as standardization sample). Therefore, psychologists McCrae and Costa developed the “Big Five” personality traits construct through firstly narrowing down the personality words by pairing up opposites (e.g., extraversion with introversion) and then factor analyzing them. What emerges was the Big Five personality traits, which are widely used to describe individual personality differences: openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism.
There exist several test variations, e.g. lexical test, statement test (a rating scale of 1 to 5 representing strongly disagree to strongly agree to certain statements), to measure the Big Five trait. People usually take the test at home or in clinical condition, and the latter is recommended in terms of the standardization of test. At the same time, ethical issues should also be taken into consideration. This can be shown by the consent form given to the participants and psychologists should keep the results confidential except for some special cases (e.g. those that are related to a lawsuit). Moreover, for people who are not well identified with the Big Five traits and display personality disorders, the test results would be used in therapeutic means.
We display each trait on a bipolar trait dimension; this means that there are two poles to each trait. For instance, introversion to extraversion, disagreeableness to agreeableness. These traits are supposed to be distributed normally in a population, which means that only a few people should be on the extreme end of each trait, and most people lie somewhere in the middle.
Although the Big Five personality test is regarded as universal because the construct validity is confirmed by studies done in different languages, question still remains about whether the “percentile score” participants receive will be the same in all cultures. After all, it is possible that one’s percentile score changes depending on the score of the other people who were also tested. For example, somebody considered to be an extravert in Asian might be seen as an introvert in North America.
So, is your personality stable most of the time? Although we tend to think personalities are static, there exist inter-personal and intra-personal variations depending on different situations. According to the equation proposed by Kurt Lewin, B = f (P/E), which means that behavior is a function of the person and the event (or situation), personality alone does not predict how the person would behave in a certain context and people’s subjective perceptions of situations and events are important. Furthermore, people can learns ways to act in certain situations that do not reflect their underlying personality. For example, as Susan Cain said in the book Quiet, many introverts tend to act as extroverts in work situations in order to succeed. One solution to the discrepancy that people display different traits in different situations is to assess personality in different situations and aggregate the results, thus taking the effect of situations factors in to consideration.
Given that the personality trait dimensions are bipolar, one end of the trait dimension can be sometimes valued more than the other end depending on the culture and the context. For example, an agreeable person is normally more socially desirable than a disagreeable one, but certain professions such as an FBI agent might prefer people low in agreeableness. Since we value certain traits more than others, the problem of conflation arises. That is, we tend to organize the good traits together and the bad traits together. In particular, we tend to assume that a person with a valued trait has other valued traits, e.g. a conscientious person is also agreeable and extraverted. However, it is important to note that the traits are independent from one another.
To sum up, the Big Five personality tests are useful in general as a framework for organizing various personality trait dimensions; however, they are best used only for a superficial assessment of personality. According to professor Koestner, the personality traits represent only the first level of personality analysis. Thus, to further understanding a person, it is important to also consider the second and third levels: values/motives and identity/life narrative.
So how do you describe your personality? Would you introduce yourself using the Big Five traits or do you use specific facets of your personality or other aspects of your identity? If you’re not sure, try this website and take a test: http://www.outofservice.com.
Jessalynn Zhao 260568027 :)
