Don’t let your personality stop you
Personality tests are used by many to get insight into their behaviour. Some people take the results as interesting and insightful and move on. On the other hand there are some people who try to use this information to make major decisions in their lives such as what program to apply for or to choose their career to pursue. Some will even go as far to not pursue a career path based on the results of a personality test. But is one’s result on a personality really such an insurmountable barrier. The answer to this question is obviously no it is not, personality is something that you can overcome and it is not fixed in stone. To make this point one must understand how personality tests work. Currently the most popular personality test is the Big 5. The big five inventory consists of five factors which were arrived at by series of lexical analyses which brought 1800 trait terms down to 180 trait terms and then there was the use of factor analysis to bring it down to five factors. These include openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Being high on openness to experience means one is open to trying new things, conscientiousness has to do with being organized, motivated and driven, extroversion has to do with being outgoing, agreeableness has to with ones to get along with others and neuroticism has to do with the extent that one has negative thoughts. In order to get ones score on a trait they must fill out a questionnaire and see where they score. After someone gets this score they usually assume that this tells them about themselves across situations. A major criticism of personality research however is that people’s expression of their personality traits are not consistent across situations. For example you will probably express a different personality when in the presence of your grandmothers as oppose to your best friend. As well personality changes over time. For example after finishing University one tends to be more agreeable by the time they finish. Even in on the extroversion- introversion continuum where there is biological mechanism predisposes a person to be introverted, there are some with this predisposition that still end up becoming extroverted. This demonstrates that this mechanism is not all deterministic, one can change their level on a trait. As well there is quite a bit of research showing that if someone finds a particular role important then they can by expending a lot of mental energy can act against their traits. All this does not mean that personality scales do not have any usefulness. They can be very useful for evaluating one’s own strengths and weaknesses and improve oneself but one should never allow the results from a personality test tell them that they can’t pursue a goal. If there is something that you really want to do then do it. Do not let one score stop you.
