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How well do you know yourself? How well do you know others. Is it even possible to say since you have only ever heard your own thoughts, felt your own feelings, and experienced what you have experienced. And who knows how really similar or different our experiences are.
There is a scientific way to approach this question. Today I will introduce the Big 5 personality traits, which has become the standard by which psychology uses data science to determine what are the major differences between people. How are you different and similar to others? Let’s find out.
My name is Shaun McMillan, and this is the Best Class Ever.
www.UnderstandMyself.com
At www.UnderstandMyself.com you can pay a small fee to take an extremely scientific personality test which will grade you against everyone else. It’s like an IQ test except it grades you along 5 different scales, and scoring higher or lower on each scale is not necessarily better or worse. It’s just different.
The reason we say it is scientific is it is not designed by any one psychologist’s ideology. Instead it is arrived at through sheer data. They started by taking a large number of personality questions without regard for quality. It doesn’t matter how good the questions are because we’ll just take a 100 questions here and another 100 questions there, and then test them on subjects. We’ll let the data tell us which questions are good and which ones are bad. Then we can throw out the bad ones and only keep the questions that are useful. How do you know if you have a good questions? If everyone answers it the same way, then it is bad. But if you get different answers from different people, then it genuinely differentiates personality. So we’ll keep the questions that differentiate people, and then group the questions that seem similar to each other and look at their wording to see what traits or groups of traits seem to emerge from the data.
After doing this they found that there are 5 to 10 different axes along which people’s personalities differ. Each of the Big 5 separates into two smaller category.
You can go to www.UnderstandMyself.com to take the test for yourself. Today I will explain the first few traits, and then I’ll explain the rest in the next lesson. There are free versions out there, but you won’t find them very helpful. If human beings can be differentiated, and those differentiations are embedded in the human language, then these are the ways in which they differentiate. There are entire college course lecture series on this subject, but I will give you a crash course for our purposes here.
A person can score high or low on each of the five traits, but remember, to score high is not better or worse. It is just different.
O.C.E.A.N.
O – Openness divides up into Intelligence and Creativity
C – Conscientiousness divides up into Orderliness and Industriousness
E – Extraversion divides up into Enthusiasm and Assertiveness
A – Agreeableness divides up into Politeness and Compassion
N – Neuroticism divides up into Volatility and Withdrawal
O-Openness
Openness divides up into Intelligence and Creativity
Openness divides up into Intelligence as measured by an IQ test and Creativity. Now typically a person who is highly creative is also usually highly intelligent. But it is important to understand that a person can be very intelligent without being creative. For example some research found that many lawyers at the top of their field scored exceptionally high in intelligence and conscientiousness, but they were found to be extremely low in creativity. But on average, a person who is high in creativity is likely to be fairly high in intelligence. If you are a creative person, again defined here as someone able to create something both novel and useful, then you are also likely to be a very creative person.
Most People are Not Creative
The first illusion we must break is the idea that everyone is creative. According to the personality research being done by the more scientific side of psychology, creativity is defined by someone who can create something novel and useful. Most adults are not creating original musical compositions, writing original stories, creating original art, re-inventing a new style, inventing new products or services that don’t yet exist, or creating new markets for business ideas no one has ever tried yet. But even for the small minority of people who are creating new ways of doing things, how many of them are doing so in a way that is useful to anyone else? Not everyone is interested in being original and not everyone should be.
I found out about this when I stumbled into a snippet of one of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lectures on creativity. In it he articulately explained that the theory that everyone is creative is ridiculous. If everyone was creative then the word itself would lose all usefulness as a way to differentiate personalities. He also explains the crux of the creative. Creativity is a high risk high reward strategy meaning most creative people are statistically unlikely to ever make any money from their creations, but the few who are successful will be exceptionally successful due to the Pareto distribution which I will explain in more detail later on in this book as well as due to the many business hurdles one most overcome to make money on something the marketplace does not yet know exists. It is by no means a conservative strategy. There are no promises of security for the artist or the entrepreneur. Yet creative people have a fundamental human need to produce creative work. If they avoid creative behaviour out of pragmatism then it can feel as though they are denying a part of their soul. Most of us never become more than hobbyists, and the hobby itself can be very expensive.
But the bright side of creativity is it opens us up to human experiences that most people will never know. The thrill of bringing something new into the world and seeing others find utility in our creations is extremely rewarding. Art is also one of the few things in this world that actually gains value over time instead of losing value. We make the world a more beautiful place. Without us there would never be anything new ever. And people love new useful things even if most of them are not capable of producing them like we are.
People who are high in openness see everything as being connected. We love learning about new subjects because we are good at finding relationships between completely disparate seemingly unrelated subjects.
But this is only one of the big five personality traits. You might be high in openness but are you high or low in the other four?
Intelligence
Now let’s talk about intelligence. This, honestly, is not my favorite part to talk about. There is a lot of ugly but honest things to say about IQ, and it is almost universally considered better to score high as opposed to low, which makes this a very sensitive subject.
Realistically speaking, one only needs as much intelligence as is required to their level of work. We don’t find that having an extremely high IQ is helpful to people if their work doesn’t require it. It is entirely possible for a person to be extremely intelligent, but still totally useless. IQ alone does not make a person good at their job, but it is the highest predictor of success.
People with low IQ are no less valuable. But it is important to recognize that at least 10% of the population has an IQ of less than 80, which means even the military, which wants to accept as many people as possible, finds that no amount of resources will make this person able to handle the duties of a soldier.
That means 1 out of 10 people simply are not capable of following written instructions well enough to take on a job. Even the most remedial jobs require us to follow instructions in detail which can often be too complicated for a person with low IQ. It’s not something the public likes to talk about, but it is unfair to expect more of someone than they are capable of. There might be welfare available for this part of the population, but they could very possibly be unable to fill out the necessary paperwork or unable to navigate the bureaucracy to get what they need.
And having an extremely high IQ is no walk in the park either. People who don’t find their work mentally challenging can often feel they should be given more difficult work, but they might not have the wisdom to be entrusted with more responsibility. They could easily feel they are not living up to their potential or become resentful of both the people around them or in authority over them who have less intelligence.
C – Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness divides up into Orderliness and Industriousness.
People who are high in orderliness are very organized, timely, clean, tidy, and appreciate systematic order, rules, and hiearchies. They appreciate the borders that keep everything separated. If you’ve ever lived with someone before then you know that people definitely vary in their needs for cleanliness and order, while some don’t value orderliness at all.
Industriousness is how productive a person is. Personally I have always felt the pressure to always be producing. When people would visit my house my parents would immediately begin to present to the visitor all of the new projects, art pieces, and new points of pride to be found within the house. I quickly inherited this trait and found myself always working on something new and ready to show it off to whoever would listen. It’s exciting to share about my projects with others. Some people might find my boasting distasteful, but those who really know me know that I am not showing off out of a narcissistic need to be acknowledged, but out of a genuine desire to share and admire the beauty of art I’ve created, or to get excited about the novelty of an experiment I’m working on. If I spend an entire day or God forbid an entire week without something new to show off, then I feel like I have not fulfilled my potential and cannot help but feel disappointed with myself. This would make me highly industrious.
After intelligence, conscientiousness is the highest predictor of success within any hierarchical structure. Hierarchies are based on the rules and our ability to follow them rigorously. This became extremely apparent to me when I became an art teacher. I tried to make my classroom as creative as possible, but fair objective grading systems simply do not consistently reward the student who creates something truly divergent or creative. Instead they reward the students who turn in their work on time, in detail, according to the rules given by the teacher. Even in art class, I found that my more creative students made worse grades even if they could draw better or had more stylized work. If they were low in conscientiousness they simply couldn’t turn in their work at the end of the week because they turned it in late, they didn’t know where they had placed it, or hadn’t bothered to keep up with it at all. I warned them that I would continue to give them poorer grades because I knew that being able to keep up with your work and follow the rules in detail would be a critical life skill for these students. It’s important to know what your natural temperament is and what weaknesses you may fall prey to.
Liberals & Conservatives
People whose political ideologies align with radical liberalism and radical conservatism also differentiate along the personality traits of Openness and Conscientiousness. Radically liberal thinkers tend to be high in openness and low in conscientiousness. Radically conservative thinkers tend to be high in conscientiousness and low in openness. A recent study by morality researchers found that conservatives value patriotism and authority. They want to preserve the rules and appreciate the hierarchy. They work hard, hold themselves to high standards, and appreciate the rewards given by authorities. They are, in other words, very judgemental, not only of others but also of themselves. Liberals on the other hand value equality, compassion, and justice. Radical liberals are more than happy to throw out the old systems and replace them with something new in the hopes of creating a more just world of equality. Both value systems are critical to maintaining peace in the world and the tension in finding the appropriate compromise between the two is what keeps the world struggling to improve without going off the rails.
As Jordan Peterson said, “We need liberals [open to new experiences] to start new businesses, but we need conservatives [consistent in their implementation of structures] to run them.”
We still have not explained Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, but we can get to those in the next lesson.
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