So you want to know about your personality…
Lots of people want to know about their own personalities, including me. Trying to understand my and other peoples’ personalities is a big interest of mine.
To that end, I started my search by looking at how other scientists have been trying to uncover the most basic meaning of the word `personality` and by looking at how understanding the limits of personality has applicability in daily life. What is somewhat surprising is that in my searching, it seems that the best definitions I have found are very fuzzy at best and not well-hammered-down, even in serious academic circles. Actually the battles rage in academia, and personality is an especially unsettled matter.
Personally, I don’t take this lack of uniform thinking in academic circles to mean that with regard to concepts of personality “anything goes,” or that we should stop trying to dissect the problem. Nor do I believe we should allow divination, blood types, MBTI gurus and authors, phrenology, Enneagrams, or other low-validity methods to inform our application of personality concepts. Nor should we declare the problem to have U&U status (i.e., unknown & unknowable).
If you think about it, you may agree that in daily conversation we use the word “personality” pretty loosely and sometimes interchangably with other slippery concepts. For example, at any given moment a person may say of another that their personality is “bad,” when all they may be describing is a chronic or semi-chronic mood state, like `grouchy` or `irritable`. OK, so what is `mood`? Well…..let’s see…..perhaps `mood` is an `attitude` that comes and goes. OK, so what is `attitude`? Well…..let’s see…..perhaps `attitude` is the way we approach and handle life and exhibit our `personality`….er…no, wait….. See the slipperiness?
So is a personality a fully hard-wired trait like blue or brown eyes? What is it’s relationship to concepts of `attitude` or `motivation` or `emotion`. Is `intelligence` a separate and distinct brain domain (or domains) from the areas that we suspect govern personality? What is the evolutionary advantage of having personalities in the first place? Can personality be changed by will or does it take a head injury, life-changing event, or something like cosmetic psychopharmacology (Prozac, Zoloft, “E”, etc.) to change it? And if so, how permanent is the change? I believe we can know these things and more.
I think that the limits of human personality are so ill-defined that one may readily fall into error if one draws them at any particular place.
— J.B.S. Haldane, U.C. Berkeley, 1932
As I see it, part of the confusion about `what is personality` stems from preconceived ideas that often accompany loose daily language. Our false sense of security about word meaning leads to many subsequent disagreements over definitions or descriptions. This is what Haldane, one of the greatest biologists and thinkers (though a former Marxist) of the early 20th century called “ill-defined” limits.
Consider that whenever scientists identify a new area of inquiry, they try to assign carefully recorded values to phenomena, to extricate the principal components that describe the phenomena. And there is generally a lot of muddled groping going on at the start. After decades, the principal components and their relationships eventually establish a taxonomy that may be further studied. We are at that point now.
The muddled groping started in the area of personality measurement approximately 80 years ago. The publication of L. Klages’ work “The Science of Character” in 1926, followed quickly by publications by F. Baumgarten and G. W. Allport were basically contemporaneous with Haldane’s famous comment. Personality assessment studies have been around longer than television. After World War II and in every decade since, large advances in statistical methods and technology have refined the basic methods that have been used, tested, checked, re-tested, and distilled as reliable tools going back to the beginning.
I have endorsed the idea encapsulated by Oliver P. John at U.C. Berkeley that “one starting place for a shared descriptive taxonomy is the natural language of personality.” This is referred to as the “lexical approach” wherein scientists have combed through dictionaries to isolate every single word currently in use within a population to extract all words containing some form of descriptive personality meaning.
This a reasonable approach if for no other reason than that as we whittle down the number of words that we use to describe traits, their meanings become more tightly coupled with the phenomena they are intended to symbolize. It would be a lot slower-going if we insisted on using the number `09547` to act as a space holder for an adjective or a phrase like `a tendency to behave with immoderation.`
After this initial word group was established using the “lexical approach,” a large number of judges, usually students, were asked to toss out arcane words no longer in use; then from that subset, students were asked to identify those words that were in most common use or that are easily understood even if rarely used. Words are then selected from that pool and tested for applicability in the general population among thousands of student subjects.
From a starting pool of approximately 15,000 English personality adjectives, a basic soup of about 2,000 adjectives were found to be in common enough use to remain in testing inventories of personality traits. These words were then inserted into neutral phrases (called `items`) and given to students on pencil-and-paper “personality tests” where the students would rank their agreement or disagreement with whether the phrase described them personally. This “self-report” mechanism had some unforeseen properties.
As it turns out, there is a lot more stability to self-report than was originally expected. People could give their responses one day, return the next and have a large degree of agreement between the two reports. Similar results were found for responses given weeks, months, even years apart. One study has even shown that responses given by college students in the 1960s were stable 30 years later, and agreed with more than 80% of the original responses for most subjects.
Another interesting thing that was not predicted about self-report is that generally the report is externally valid. It was expected that people would “cheat” to make themselves look more favorable to themselves or others, something called a `social desirability` motive. But actually, a frank personal protocol (the set of responses) using a reasonably valid, comprehensive modern inventory is very likely to agree with others’ assessments of that individual. This is called `acquaintance judgment agreement` and leading research on that topic is ongoing today at Penn State University.
Procedurally, a good thing about self-report is that it is a rapid way to independently assess the underlying structure in the responses, which presumably represents a “fingerprint” or defining set of characteristics of an individual’s personality. The words used to describe what we think of as `personality` also largely describe features of interpersonal dealings, behaviors with and among others, as well as internal states that manifest outwardly for the judgment of others, so it is no surprise that the main “factors” or primary structures that have been identified statistically are also named with descriptive words we know and use.
Even in the earliest inventories 80 years ago, the original analyses and re-analyses using modern methods identify mathematically significant “structure” which have been broken down into “Factors” or “Dimensions” which are almost completely separate from each other. These independent Factors are considered to be like primary colors in the sense that as Red, Blue and Yellow tints may be mixed at different strengths to create thousands of identifiable colors, so too are Factors mixed in individuals to make a unique personality.
In the 1980s two astute psychologists authored a commercial inventory that was based on a 20-year review of the literature and consolidated all that had been found to be important until that time. Their product departed from other incomplete attempts at a descriptive inventory which ignored Neuroticism (MBTI primarily) and focused on the interpersonal value of Neuroticism, Extraversion and Openness. It was called `NEO` for short, and since it was a personality inventory, they added the suffix of `PI.`
The NEO PI was tested on thousands and thousands of people, by painstaking pencil-and-paper methods. The protocols were obtained, scores analyzed, and eventually it became clear that for statistical reasons, the other two Big Five Factors, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness needed better representation, and the distribution and number of items for all Factors needed adjustment to get a more comprehensive “fingerprint” from individuals. The `Revised` NEO PI or the NEO PI-R™, was republished by original authors Paul T. Costa, Jr. and Robert R. McCrae
The genuine NEO PI-R™ (with 240 items) is considered by many psychologists to be the best inventory for measuring traits within the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. The NEO PI-R™ and NEO PI-3™ are copyrighted by Psychological Assessment Resources (PAR) in Florida, and can only be ordered by professionals and used by permission. You can contact PAR at: 1-800-331-TEST (8378), or https://www.parinc.com.
Some psychologists disagree with the idea that an area of active research such as personality should be made exclusive by means of copyright and trademark, and available only for clinical people, for pay. One very active, smart and indomitable psychologist who feels this way is Lewis R. “Atomic Elbow” Goldberg of the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, Oregon. He is the founder of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a self-described `collaboratory` on the web, an open-source scientific haven for people to freely engage their own research on personality without fear of lawsuit for copyright infringement.
In the 1990s, Goldberg purchased every respected “proprietary” inventory he could locate, (click here to see which) and arrived at 1,699 (2,036) items that were worthy of exploration. He reviewed the items, the factors and facets they named for each item, and reviewed their statistics. He reformulated the items in his words (avoiding copyright) and arrived at equivalent or near-equivalent English items. He tested the new pool against the parent source, slightly reorganized the final inventory to enhance statistical value, then rechecked validity with thousands of volunteers. The final result has been a symmetric 300-item inventory called the `IPIP-NEO` which in many respects is statistically superior to the NEO PI-R. The URL for Goldberg’s IPIP-NEO is http://ipip.ori.org/. It is the basis for the inventory I administer in a few more pages.
Administration of a personality inventory is generally done in some form of numbered format: selecting discrete responses as in “always”, “sometimes”, “never” format. The more typical is the 5-point input or Likert method. My inventory of choice is obviously the IPIP representation of the NEO PI-R™, or the IPIP-NEO. On the next page you may think some of the questions are silly or irrelevant. Like Connection Type.
Factors or Dimensions. As mentioned before the inventory, the primary concept that makes this site unique is that it is based on a lexical approach to the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. In the following 5 pages you will see not only generalized descriptions of these standard 5 factors observed in all humans worldwide across a variety of testing methods, but you will also see how your responses compare relative to others in your age and gender group. All normalized graphs are weighted to reflect your relative standing among the broader population. The normative data which is used to standardize you results are the product of hundreds of thousands of prior inventory protocols.
Facets. Just as diamonds and jewels have different facets, so too do the Factors or Dimensions as they are currently constructed. Early in the research, it became apparent that descriptive words that hinted at various aspects of the meanings of the overarching Factors could actually be subgrouped and lash together values of groups of items, and be assigned meaningful descriptive terms themselves. As a matter of statistical convenience, these Facets were reduced to a symmetric, even, easy-to-manage set of 6 per Factor, with features of some Facets slightly overlapping onto others. These 30 facets are a very good representative way to speak of people’s personality traits in a standardized way.
The values of the Facets are calculated independently of the overall Factors; the Factors are not just a simple sum or product or average of Facet values. In some cases, you may see Facet values that on average, significantly vary with the overall respective Factor value. Do not be alarmed, this is just the age and gender normalization that is skewing your values to make them more representative in reality.
Randomness. If for some reason you decided not to take this very seriously, you may note wild variations between values. Now that you have completed a `protocol` for the most valid and comprehensive personality inventory currently in use on the web, the IPIP-NEO, you should be very pleased with yourself. Very few people have the courage or patience to look at themselves so bluntly for so long.