Big Five

Today I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the big five factor model to personality mapping. It is one of the most accepted and widely used methods of personality mapping. Essentially this model boils down a plethora of adjectives and traits that could be used to describe a person’s personality into five comprehensive scales. There are a number of tests that one can find on the internet to map one’s personality. Though there are sometimes different synonyms to name the five factors, they are generally openness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness.

I took two of these internet tests for good measure. Both tests ended up being pretty similar. I scored very high on both openness and extroversion in both tests. This means that I have a tendency to be curious and open to art and learning, as well as talkative and sociable. I fell average on agreeableness, meaning that I am a mix of trusting and friendly as well as aggressive. I scored mildly high on neuroticism. This means that I have a tendency to be less relaxed. The score that I was lowest on was conscientious. This implies that I am disorganized, and perhaps can become distracted from tasks.

There are a great deal of uses for this particular scale, mostly in research, but I think there are still issues. Firstly, it becomes tempting to make broad assertions about an individual because of how they score on these particular scales. For instance, if one were to score lowly on a factor such as conscientiousness it may be because they are disorganized, yet the score also implies that they are easily distracted. This is actually strange to me, because I have read a number of articles and papers that suggest that messy desks and disorganized workspace are actually a signs of a more efficient thinker.

Another issue with the big five testing is the way we have to gain that information. It is through self survey, and there is always a problem with that. I did a bit a research recently about the psychological difference between the Japanese and those in the United States. They used the five factor model to compare the two peoples, and found that the Japanese scored significantly worse on all aspects than the Americans when scoring themselves, yet higher when scoring one another. The conclusion that was reached was that those in the United States were far more apt to be critical of others, and bolster their own scores, while the Japanese were more critical of themselves, and complimentary to others. This tendency for the Japanese to be humble, and the Americans to not be, shows that how one decides to answer can skew the results of a test like this.

In the end, it is still a relatively effective and useful way to gauge one’s personality, or at very least how one views themselves, or wishes others to view them. There may never be a perfect way to map personality. I think that is why it is so interesting. People are interesting.

Take one of the tests. How did you score? What do you think this says about your personality? Do you think it is accurate? Answer honestly, because you will only be lying to yourself.

Come back next time, where I will be discussing Ellis’s sixth personality trait: scientific thinking.

Ellis and Healthy Personalities #3: Tolerance

First, I would like to apologize for my lengthy absence. The holidays, and other events, had me pretty occupied. I hope that I will soon be back into the full swing of things.

Ellis’s third trait of a healthy personality is tolerance. Tolerance in this context is the ability to tolerate the actions of others. Ellis states that one who demonstrates tolerance gives “other human beings the right to be wrong, and while disliking or abhorring some of their behavior, still not blame them as a person, for performing this disliked behavior.” This is much much easier said than done.

Often in life people behave in ways that displease us. Sometimes we can let these things go, and sometimes we hold grudges. Separating a person from their behavior is not always an easy task. Our language and culture is often even structured in a way that persuades us to define ourselves by the actions that we take. We are naturally inclined to characterize individuals by the actions they take, and this makes it very easy to characterize them poorly for such actions that we do not find acceptable.

I think an important point that Ellis makes is that it is not healthy to unrealistically expect others to be perfect. People will inevitably error, or act out of the realm of reasonable action. It is completely foreseeable that most, if not all people that one may encounter in one’s life, would at some time or another happen to offend them in some way. So to expect that people will act perfectly and never offend or upset you is unreasonable. Furthermore, to expect any one particular individual to never offend is also unreasonable. This highlights a pitfall that many relationships, romantic, familial, or even friendships, become susceptible too. Sometimes when we become close with friends or significant others, we begin to expect them to be completely sensitive to all of our own needs and to consider our feelings with every turn. Not only does this reflect a poor self sufficiency, but it also is an unreasonable demand from others, and anyone relying too heavily on the consideration of one’s needs in other’s actions will be sorely disappointed. This disappointment can breed resentment and distain. This is why tolerance is healthy in this instance. You can learn to manage when people do not act in the manner that you would prefer.

Though one can learn to tolerate other’s actions, and accept them as fallible human beings as Ellis would suggest, this does not mean that one would be best if they were to roll over, or allow oneself to be subjected to unfair treatment. A balance of acting on self-interest in response to undesirable actions by others, while accepting those actions as those of a flawed and valuable human being can be struck. That is not to say that all actions should be unanswered and just roll off everyone’s back like so much water on ducks. For example, human rights violations, dangerous criminal actions, and violence should definitely be impeded, but the committers of these acts can still be valued. Like Hitler. The actions of he and the Nazi party were appalling, and I doubt that many rational individuals would argue that they should not have been stopped. Yet, with proper and healthy tolerance, we can see Hitler and his party as flawed, deeply disturbed human beings with irrational ideas, rather than inhuman monsters. From this viewpoint, we can still desire to end the actions of such individuals, but respect their human rights as well. It is when we let the actions of others affect us so deeply, begin to commit war crimes, murder for revenge, torture for information, and thus become the “monsters” that we seek to stop. That may be slightly politicized, which I try to avoid, but I think that this point very much applies here.

Overall, in daily life we can learn to forgive and tolerate the minor infractions against us, letting these small infractions go without holding these trespasses against others, accepting that those around us will err. It may be difficult to do, but healthy practice and demonstration of tolerance can lift a great deal of undo anxiety and stress that we experience by latching onto negative feelings that are often produced in reaction to the actions of others that happen to offend us.

What do you think about tolerance in this sense? Lack of this kind of tolerance seems to be the stem of a lot of anger issues. What kind of issues with anger have you experienced?

Come back next time when I talk about the importance of word choice. In the distant future I will cover Ellis’s fourth personality trait: acceptance of uncertainty.

Skinner Ate My Dinner

B.F. Skinner was, in my opinion, unmistakably a genius, and he did great work. His contribution to psychology is undeniable. In his time, Skinner’s theories and the behaviorist philosophy dominated American psychology. The central ideas of behaviorism are that a person’s actions and behaviors can be shaped through reinforcement and conditioning. Behaviorism as a science unequivocally works. It is empirical in nature and its ability to accurately predict human behavior gives it great validity. It is simple and elegant in its explanations and methods. I have no problem with the science of the behaviorist position.

Where it begins to falter for me, is when the behaviorist ideals are taken beyond the science and presented in the field of social or personality theory. To observe and conclude that one can be manipulated by changes in the environment is reasonable and scientific, but to say that people are nothing but these manipulations is quite a leap. Skinner himself went this far with his ideas. He put forth that people should give up the concept of freedom, because there is really no true free will. He viewed people, as well as animals, as organisms solely constructed by the environment that surrounds them and the reinforcements they receive.

Now it is true that these ideas have faded in popularity. In modern psychology, it is pretty widely accepted that people are products of both nature and nurture, external and internal processes. However, I have looked around the internet at some forums and the like, and while you have to take everything you find on the internet with a grain of salt, it is hard to ignore the strict behavioral attitudes. The irony here is that many of the individuals that portray this ideal do so in a very pessimistic matter, while Skinner himself was an unrelenting optimist.

One issue I have seen brought up quite a few times in favor of this idea of strict behaviorism is the idea of no true neutral. This idea holds that we can never have a truly unbiased view on any decision, and therefore never truly have the freedom of choice in any situation. We have been biased through conditioning and reinforcement against or in favor of almost any choice in front of us. This begs the question: If we have no real neutral position, and every decision is biased by prior experience and reinforcement, are we really making decisions based on free will, or are we simply carrying out programming? This is an interesting thought. It can even make you doubt your own motives, or your control over yourself. The problem I see with this is that it overlooks intentionality. We can intentionally and deliberately make choices that go against all of our better judgment and conditioning. This is the case in the act of rebellion. If all conditioning prompted a person to pick up a blue cup filled with water rather than the red cup filled with water, and someone told a group of people that they would pick up the blue cup no matter what, it is not unforeseeable that someone, out of stubbornness, would pick up the red cup in defiance. Could defiance have links to childhood reinforcement? Possibly, but we have all known people that are more spirited, more argumentative, and more rebellious than others for no apparent reason. It seems as if they have some predisposition toward stubbornness, and even this slight predisposition to disobey shows that they, if not everyone, are more than simply our conditioning.

Another big problem with a strict behaviorist view is found in addressing creativity, in particular, children’s creative use of language. Children create words, phrases and linguistic structure that are not presented to them. These errors are not reinforced or even taught. The children simply take the few rules they may have learned, then assume, speculate, and create new ideas. These things are not products of their environment, and they are not reinforced behavior. They come from the children’s own cognitive ability, above and beyond conditioning.

Overall, I find the science of behaviorism fascinating, but the social theory lacking. I believe that we do have choice, in everything we do. Once we become aware of that choice, and the reinforcements that sometimes dictate our actions, we can exercise our intentionality, and choose the way we react to things. I find the thought that we are nothing but conditioned automata relatively depressing, and I can see how the idea has been recently linked to such negativity and pessimism. I would like to keep my optimism, and consider intentionality and choice something that is still very much alive.

Come back next time when I discuss Ellis’ third trait of a healthy personality: Tolerance. The week after that I will be talking about the importance of the words that we choose to use.

Ellis and Healthy Personalities #1: Self Interest

Out of all the writers and psychologists I have read and studied, and even out of the ones that I like, Albert Ellis stands alone. There is something about his perspective and positions that really clicks with me. Ellis was the pioneer of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, or REBT. Here I would like to discuss portions of Ellis's view on personality, and what makes a personality healthy.

In one of his articles entitled Case Against Religion, Ellis writes that a psychotherapist tries to help patients to become minimally anxious and hostile. He said to become minimally hostile and anxious we should promote nine basic personality traits. He briefly outlines these nine base traits that lead to a healthy personality. The first of these traits is “self interest.”

Self interest, as described by Ellis, is a truthfulness to one’s self, without masochistic sacrifice of oneself for others. This would classify those willing to commit altruistic suicide (suicide for the betterment of a group, i.e suicide bombers, cult members, and kamikaze pilots) as having an unhealthy low self interest. These are extreme cases however. Even those that harm themselves short of suicide, for example financially or emotionally, have a low unhealthy low self interest. Over-donating to excess can be seen by an outside observer as a noble practice, while in reality it may be a self destructive and maladaptive behavior stemming from poor personality traits.

Ellis is not condoning outright megalomaniacal, narcissistic selfishness by saying one should have an interest of himself/herself first and foremost. In fact he goes on to say that one's kindness and consideration of others can actually be fueled by the desire to be free from pain and restriction. By considering others, in a manner that is not self sacrificing, an individual can promote an environment where his own needs are met and considered. One may consider the motivation of self comfort to do right by others to be a selfish and undesirable thing. I personally believe that it says a lot about human nature that we have qualms with motivation for good deeds; we often forget that there are easier alternative methods for achieving self comfort that no one normally considers, namely total annihilation of opposition. What I mean by this is that those who would have a problem with a self interest based motivation for altruism are essentially splitting hairs, taking for granted that the altruism is taking place in the first place.

Essentially altruism and good deeds can come from one of two opposing places. Firstly, altruism can have a root in low self interest, and this is a destructive behavior by nature. These deeds can be harmful, because the individual does not have the self interest enough to stop giving before the giving causes irreparable damage. This can lead to overworking oneself to death, or donating assets until economic ruin. The opposite of this is of course giving because one has a high self interest. I agree with Ellis when he says that people may give to promote an atmosphere that ensures that they themselves may feel free from unnecessary pain and restrictions. In fact, famed biologist Richard Dawkins wrote an entire book exploring the biological connections between selfishness and altruism called The Selfish Gene. A video found here gives a brief but interesting bit about Dawkins' ideas regarding selfishness and altruism. Though I do agree with both Ellis and Dawkins about how altruism is strongly connected to self preservation as well as ensuring self comfort, I think that the selfish nature of altruism can have a more immediate, while equally selfish, positive reinforcement. People sometimes talk about the elation they feel when they give to charities or help those less fortunate. This positive feeling can even be somewhat addictive. The positive emotion that comes with giving could very well have evolved over time, in order to encourage us to be altruistic in order to preserve ourselves as a species.

In the end, it is important to have self interest. Even if the social mainstream deems selfishness as a negative quality, selflessness is, in essences, selfish in nature. We can be selfish in a way that helps our fellow man. There are the rare cases where people are selfish to a narcissistic degree, but that is maladaptive behavior that not many consider normal. Most of the world tends to aid one another and view that as a positive thing, selfishly lending a helping hand.

What do you think about self interest? Do you think an underlying selfish motivation diminishes the deed itself? What other positive reinforcements do you think there are for selfish acts of altruism?