Personality

• 1. Introduction

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  Personality describes the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that make up a person's unique adjustment to life. An individual can develop anger during their life, or fall into a state of depression. The patterns are relatively stable, yet they shift over time through experience and developmental processes. There is no consensus on what personality even is. Most theories circle the same four anchors: traits, motivation, skills, and identity. So how do you measure something with no agreed definition? Why do extraverts tend to be happier than introverts, and what happens inside an introvert who decides to act outgoing? The questions reach further than psychology. They touch a Renaissance poem rediscovered in 1417, a philosopher who claimed temperament secretly drives every argument, and the chemistry of hormones in the brain.

• 2. Measuring The Immeasurable

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  Two main tools dominate the attempt to pin down personality: objective tests and projective measures. The list runs from the Big Five Inventory and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to the Rorschach Inkblot test, the Neurotic Personality Questionnaire KON-2006, and Eysenck's Personality Questionnaire. Each is valued for two qualities that make a test accurate, reliability and validity. Because personality is a complex idea, the dimensions and scales of these tests vary and are often poorly defined.

  Factor analysis pulls dimensions out of large questionnaires statistically. When the results are reduced to two dimensions, psychologists often reach for introvert-extrovert and neuroticism, the emotionally unstable-stable axis first proposed by Eysenck in the 1960s. A recent but not well-known tool, the 16PF, measures personality through Cattell's 16-factor theory. Psychologists also use the 16PF clinically to diagnose psychiatric disorders and to help with prognosis and therapy planning. The principle behind a sound questionnaire is plain: "Each item should be influenced to a degree by the underlying trait construct, giving rise to a pattern of positive intercorrelations so long as all items are oriented (worded) in the same direction."

• 3. OCEAN And Its Genes

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  Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism form the approach with the most support in the field, the Big Five, often memorized as "OCEAN". About half of the variance in these five factors appears attributable to a person's genetics rather than to environment. Each of the five splits into two aspects and many facets. Openness, for example, divides into experiencing and intellect, which themselves split into facets like fantasy and ideas.

  The five factors also correlate with one another in ways that point to higher order meta-traits. Factor beta combines openness and extraversion into a meta-trait tied to mental and physical exploration. There are several frameworks that recognize the Big Five, and thousands of measures exist for specific facets as well as general traits. The structure even holds before personality fully forms. Personality changes much more quickly during childhood, so the constructs in children are called temperament, regarded as the precursor to personality.

• 4. The Happiness Of Extraverts

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  Acting talkative, assertive, adventurous, and outgoing produced a striking result in one study: after acting extraverted, introverts felt more positive affect, the experience of happy and enjoyable emotions. Extraverts asked to behave the opposite way reported lower positive affect and suffered ego depletion. Ego depletion is cognitive fatigue, the cost of using energy to act against one's inner disposition. Drained that way, a person cannot easily make difficult decisions, plan ahead, regulate emotions, or perform on other cognitive tasks.

  Two families of explanation address why extraverts tend to be happier. Instrumental theories say extraverts choose more positive situations and react more strongly to them. Temperamental theories say extraverts are simply disposed toward higher positive affect. Lucas and Baird found no statistically significant support for the instrumental theory, but did find that extraverts experience a higher level of positive affect.

  Researchers have hunted for mediators between extraversion and happiness. Self-efficacy, a person's belief in their abilities to meet personal standards and make important life decisions, only partially mediates the link. Self-esteem appears to be another such factor, as more confident individuals show both higher well-being and higher extraversion. Mood maintenance offers a third lead. It is the ability to hold one's average happiness in an ambiguous situation, and it is stronger in extroverts. That means an extravert's positive moods last longer than an introvert's.

• 5. Temperaments In The Brain

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  Harm avoidance, reward dependence, novelty-seeking, and persistence are the four basic temperaments in modern conceptions such as the Temperament and Character Inventory. They reflect automatic responses to danger and reward built on associative learning. They loosely echo the ancient melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic types, though they describe dimensions rather than distinct categories.

  The biological basis of personality holds that genes, hormones, and brain areas underlie individual differences. Neuropsychology supplies the map. The frontal lobes handle foresight and anticipation, the occipital lobes process visual information. The hormone testosterone matters for sociability, affectivity, aggressiveness, and sexuality. Studies even show that the expression of a personality trait depends on the volume of the brain cortex associated with it.

• 6. Parents, Peers, And Twins

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  Mary Ainsworth's strange situation experiment watched babies react to having their mother leave them alone in a room with a stranger. The attachment styles she labeled were Secure, Ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized. Securely attached children tend to be more trusting, sociable, and confident day to day. Disorganized children showed higher levels of anxiety, anger, and risk-taking behavior.

  Judith Rich Harris's group socialization theory upends the obvious culprit. It argues that peer groups, not parental figures, are the primary influence on personality and behavior in adulthood. Intra- and intergroup processes, rather than parent-child relationships, carry culture and reshape a child's traits. Tetsuya Kawamoto's work on personality change from life experiences found that "the accumulation of small daily experiences may work for the personality development of university students and that environmental influences may vary by individual susceptibility to experiences, like attachment security."

  Siblings sharing a home turn out to share less personality than expected, since individual experiences outweigh the common environment. Identical twins resemble each other in personality largely because of shared genetic makeup, not shared surroundings. Personality also pushes back on the world. When a person's traits steer the situations they create or choose, that is situation selection. When their behavior pulls reactions from others that reinforce those same tendencies, that is situation evocation.

• 7. One Self Across Cultures

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  Seven thousand one hundred thirty-four people across six languages took the NEO-PI-R, one of the most widely used personality measures, and the same five underlying constructs found in the American factor structure appeared again. The Big Five Inventory repeated the feat in 56 nations across 28 languages, with the five factors supported conceptually and statistically across major regions of the world. Cross-cultural assessment depends on this universality, the question of whether common traits hold regardless of culture.

  Emic traits are constructs unique to each culture, shaped by local customs, beliefs, and characteristics. Etic traits are universal constructs evident across cultures, pointing to a biological basis. Differences that do appear may reflect real cultural variation, or they may stem from poor translations, biased sampling, or differing response styles. A lexical approach carries its own limits, since languages have unique words for emotions and situations that resist translation.

  Western cultures value individualism, independence, and assertiveness, qualities mirrored in extraversion. Eastern cultures value collectivism, cooperation, and social harmony, mirrored in agreeableness. Cultural norms, beliefs, and practices shape how people interact, which feeds back into personality development. Yet the idea of a single human self is itself young. The modern sense of individual personality grew from cultural shifts originating in the Renaissance, an essential element in modernity.

• 8. Temperament As Philosophy

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  "Dependent on the family, the individual alone was nothing," Jacques Gelis observed of the medieval world, where "the household, the Kinship network, the guild, the corporation" were the building blocks of personhood. Stephen Greenblatt, recounting the recovery in 1417 of Lucretius' poem De rerum natura, wrote that "at the core of the poem lay key principles of a modern understanding of the world." The modern man, by contrast, is shaped by urbanization, education, mass communication, industrialization, and politicization.

  William James, who lived from 1842 to 1910, argued that temperament secretly drives the history of philosophy. Philosophers seek impersonal reasons, yet their temperament biases their conclusions, a bias born of the trust they place in it. In his 1907 Pragmatism lectures, James built a trait theory of two camps. Rationalists he called "tender-minded" and "going by principles"; empiricists he called "tough-minded" and "going by facts." Rationalism, to the fact-loving mind, looked like pretension and a leaning toward abstraction.

  John Locke, who lived from 1632 to 1704, grounded personal identity in consciousness, which "always accompanies thinking, it is that which makes everyone to be what he calls self." Rene Descartes, 1596 to 1650, split the mind into active and passive faculties, the passive receiving and the active forming ideas. David Hume, 1711 to 1776, and the empirical psychologists after him denied the soul except as a name for the cohesion of inner lives. Benedictus Spinoza, 1632 to 1677, held that ideas are the first element of the human mind, but exist only for actually existing things. Henry A. Murray gathered such threads under one name, personology, the branch of psychology that studies whole human lives and the factors that shape their course.