DISCUSSION 4 - THE BIG FIVE
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Personality101-pp.30-31BigFiveFactor.pdf
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The Structure of Personality: The Big Five. If personality psychology were to advance from a preliminary classifi cation of traits to the prediction of real-world outcomes and other psychological constructs, it would be essential to establish a consensus concerning the number and nature of traits that are necessary to describe the basic psychological differences between individuals. While both Cattell and Eysenck have made notorious contributions in this respect, the system that appears to have won the vote of most differential psychologists is the Five Factor Model, also referred to as the Big Five personality traits.
Like Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors, and Eysenck’s Gigantic Three, the Big Five personality framework is based on factor analytic evidence. And like the models presented above, it origi- nated from the lexical hypothesis, that is, the assumption that the major dimensions of individual differences can be derived from the total number of descriptors in any language system. So what is different about the Five Factor Model? The answer is straightforward: a large body of research evidence.
The decades following Cattell’s initial attempts to consoli- date a lexical-based personality model largely consisted of trait psychologists’ search for a taxonomy of personality that could represent the fundamental and truly independent trait dimen- sions. A now only widely quoted study conducted by Norman (1967), which drew upon earlier research conducted by Allport, Cattell, Tupes and Christal (1961/1992) and others, indicated that fi ve factors were both necessary and suffi cient to explain the fundamental structure of personality. Norman’s work has since been replicated by a vast number of research studies and several meta-analyses (which estimate the average correlation in hun- dreds or thousands of studies). The fi ve factors found in these studies have been shown to have good validity and reliability across research studies, varying populations, and spanning sev- eral decades. This has led most researchers today to agree on a personality taxonomy that consists of fi ve major personality dimensions. According to the Five Factor taxonomy, the fi ve
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-22 11:12:40.
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major personality traits or factors are Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, hence the widely used acronyms of NEOAC or OCEAN.
So what do these fi ve factors correspond to? The fi rst two factors of the Big Five, Neuroticism and Extraversion, are nearly identical to the ones proposed by Eysenck and will now be famil- iar to you. The third factor, Openness to experience, is derived from the ideas of Coan (1974) and represents the tendency to engage in intellectual activities and experience new sensations and ideas. This factor is also referred to as creativity, intellect, and culture (Goldberg, 1993). It comprises the primary facets of fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values. In a general sense, Openness to experience is associated with intel- lectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, vivid imagination, behav- ioral fl exibility, and unconventional attitudes. People high on Openness to experience tend to be dreamy, imaginative, inven- tive, and nonconservative in their thoughts and opinions. Poets and artists (and, to some extent, psychologists and psychol- ogy students, too) may be regarded as typical examples of high Openness scorers.
A fourth factor, Agreeableness (also known as sociabil- ity), refers to friendly, considerate, and modest behavior. Thus Agreeableness is associated with a tendency toward friendliness and nurturance and comprises the subfacets of trust, straight- forwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender- mindedness. Agreeable people can thus be described as caring, friendly, warm, and tolerant, and have a general predisposition for prosocial behavior.
Finally, Conscientiousness is associated with proactivity, responsibility, and self-discipline. (Does this apply to you? If you’re reading this book just before your exam, perhaps not!) This factor includes the primary dimensions of competence, order, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline, and deliberation. Conscientious individuals are best identifi ed by their effi ciency, organization, determination, and productiv- ity. No wonder, then, that this personality dimension has been
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-22 11:12:40.
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reported to be signifi cantly associated with various types of performance.
How Many Factors Should We Use? As you can see, there are three novel personality traits identifi ed and included in the Big Five taxonomy that are not present—although arguably represented—in the Eysenckian model. Specifi cally, Eysenck’s idea of Psychoticism would be conceptualized in terms of low Agreeableness, high Openness to experience, and low Conscientiousness (Digman & Inouye, 1986; Goldberg, 1982; McCrae, 1987), but Eysenck considered Openness as an indicator of intelligence or the cognitive aspect of personality rather than of temperament. On the other hand, Eysenck and Eysenck (1985) conceptualized Agreeableness as a combination of low Psychoticism, low Neuroticism, and high Extraversion rather than as a personality dimension in its own right. A large number of studies have empirically examined this relationship. In general, Neuroticism and Extraversion have been found to be overlapping dimensions in both systems, suggesting that the Big Five and Gigantic Three are assessing two pairs of almost identical traits. However, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness tend to correlate only moderately with Psychoticism (r = –.45 and –.31, respectively), and Openness has been found to be uncorrelated with Psychoticism (r = .05) (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2011). Thus, the systems seem to differ to some extent in their assessment of traits other than Neuroticism and Extraversion.
At this point, you would be forgiven to think that the exis- tence of a variety of models, which include different number of factors, refl ects some arbitrariness in psychologists’ attempts to identify the fundamental structure of personality. However, before you are drawn to such a conclusion, you should consider that three, and at most fi ve, factors are consistently found in studies of this kind. Rarely do researchers fi nd four, six, one, or ten factors. These fi ndings can not be considered statistical arti- facts. For instance, in intelligence research with similar statis- tical methodologies, researchers consistently fi nd a one-factor solution. And as mentioned before, this factor structure is found across a large number of research studies, in various cultures,
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-22 11:12:40.
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and across genders, and different ages. Thus, whether it is three factors or fi ve may depend on whether a researcher judges that the fi ve factors can be condensed into three. However, research- ers rarely dispute the large amount of research evidence that demonstrates the existence of a personality structure that con- sists of either three or, most notably, fi ve factors.
Criticism of the Big Five. Despite its popularity, the Five Factor Model has been criticized for its lack of theoretical explanations for the development and nature of the processes underlying some of its personality factors, in particular Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (see Matthews & Deary, 1998, for a detailed discussion on this topic). This means that, even if the Big Five factors represent an accurate description of individuals, it is not known where differences in these traits arise from.
Another more recent criticism regards the relationship among the Big Five traits. Although the fi ve factors are meant to be orthogonal or unrelated, when Neuroticism is reversed and scored in terms of emotional stability, several studies reported all fi ve traits to be positively and signifi cantly intercorrelated (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2011). Although these intercorrelations are usually modest, they may suggest that personality could be further simplifi ed to more “basic” underlying traits, perhaps even one general factor. On the other hand, differential psy- chologists (such as Digman, 1997) have speculated on the pos- sibility that these positive intercorrelations among the Big Five factors may be a refl ection of sociably agreeable responding (or “faking good”), as high scores on the Big Five, at least in the United States and Western European countries, are more “desir- able” than low scores (remember, this rule only applies when Neuroticism is reversed).
However, the Five Factor Model has shown good validity and reliability, leading most researchers to agree on the existence of fi ve major personality dimensions, as well as the advantages of assess- ing these dimensions through the NEO Personality Inventory- Revised (NEO-PI-R) (Costa & McCrae, 1985, 1992). Perhaps the
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-22 11:12:40.
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most obvious advantage of this consensus is the agreement itself, which allows researchers to compare and replicate studies on personality and other variables, providing a shared or common instrument to assess personality. Thus the Big Five are the “lati- tude and longitude” (Ozer & Reise, 1994, p. 361) along which any behavioral aspects can be consensually mapped.
In that sense, the choice of a unique instrument to assess individual differences in personality may be compared to that of a single and universal currency, software, or language, which provides a common ground for the trading and decoding of goods, information, or knowledge. Besides, the advantage of the NEO-PI-R Five Factor Model is that it accounts not only for a lay taxonomy of personality (based on the lexical hypothesis), but also for other established systems, which can be somehow “translated” into the Five Factor system. Thus, fi ndings on other scales may be interpreted in terms of the Big Five personality traits, just as other currencies can be converted into dollars or euros according to a given exchange rate. For example, self- monitoring, or the extent to which an individual evaluates his or her behavior and the way this may be perceived by others (Snyder, 1987), could be largely explained in terms of high Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism. On the other hand, authoritarianism (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) may be partly understood as a combination of low Openness and Agreeableness.
The Person-Situation Controversy
In introducing our discussion of the trait approach, the fi rst assumption of trait psychology was made clear: Traits are con- sistent patterns in thoughts, feelings, and behavior, both across situations and over time. Indeed, the large amount of research evidence and the various theories presented in the rest of the section were based on this fundamental assumption of “con- sistency.” On the one hand this assumption is intuitive. People behave consistently, which is why we consider them to have
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personalities in the fi rst place. On the other hand, intuition also tells us that we don’t act the same way in all situations. For instance, even if you consider yourself shy, you are probably not shy in all situations. You may be shy in some parties but socia- ble in others. Alternatively, you may generally be withdrawn when you meet new people but always gregarious around your friends. Similarly, acquaintances may consider you agreeable while your friends may say you are very opinionated. You may be lazy in some aspects but hardworking in others.
These statements probably do not baffl e you—they seem common sense. However, this very fact raises a fundamental question: How consistent is the hypothesized consistency in the fi rst place? That is, are we actually sociable, agreeable, or con- scientious across most situations? Or does our behavior change depending on the situation that we are in (e.g., a friend’s birth- day party or a family gathering), the people we are with (close friends or work colleagues), or the role that we have (employee or boy or girl friend)? This question of the relative stability of traits across situations began over 30 years ago and came to be known as the person-situation controversy.
In the 1960s, the so-called situationist movement raised a fundamental attack against the trait theory. At the fore- front of this movement was Walter Mischel. In his 1968 book Personality and Assessment, Mischel reviewed research evidence from the literature that revealed that people may in reality be behaving much less consistently than trait theories would pre- dict. For instance, in a now classic study concerning children’s honesty, behaviors such as cheating, lying, and stealing were only marginally correlated when assessed in different settings, such as the classroom, at home, or in social settings. The study unambiguously showed that a child that was dishonest in one setting (say cheated in class) was not necessarily dishonest in another (i.e., did not cheat when it came to sports). In fact, the correlations between these behaviors in different settings rarely exceeded .3. Mischel reviewed a number of studies that indeed seemed to show the same pattern of results. Following
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his review, Mischel’s conclusion was clear: Evidence clearly showed that behavior is largely determined by the characteris- tics of the situation and not the characteristics of the person.
Unavoidably, this criticism was a fundamental challenge to the very existence of the fi eld of personality psychology. In its mild form, the argument would suggest that personality is not very important. In its extreme form, it would suggest that personality does not exist.
Unsurprisingly, Mischel’s attack on the trait concept was met by a vigorous counter-reaction from trait psychologists. The reaction took several forms. Some psychologists argued that Mischel was selective in his review of the evidence. Others contested the real-world value of the fi ndings, most of which derived from studies carried out in artifi cial, or experimental, settings. A third criticism comes from the diffi culty in actually determining that a given behavior is a manifestation of a given trait. Burping after a meal may be seen as a sign of disagreeable- ness or low Conscientiousness in western cultures, but in Korea, it is a polite response. Giving someone the fi nger and sticking one’s tongue out at the person are different behaviors, but both act to signify consistent intentions (Hogan, 2007).
Importantly, psychologists pointed out that Mischel’s dis- missal of the signifi cance of personality traits’ predictive power based on the correlation value of .3 (even if this correlation was not underestimated) is incorrect. According to theorists, a corre- lation of this size can have substantial practical utility (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Indeed, such effect sizes would be considered very respectable, for instance, in medical practices. One extreme example is the negative correlation of .034 between aspirin con- sumption and heart attack, which was enough for researchers to conclude that a monumental breakthrough had been made (Rosenthal, 1990).
There is no doubt, however, that the most important coun- ter-argument against Mischel’s claims concerned his very con- cept of consistency. According to critics, Mischel signifi cantly underestimated the true predictive power of traits because of a
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conceptual fl aw. Specifi cally, they argued that the studies that he reviewed seemed to show low cross-situational consistency because they usually assessed specifi c behaviors only on single occasions. The above-mentioned study concerning children’s honesty, for instance, would assess the correlation between dis- honesty (e.g., cheating) displayed on one occasion (e.g., in class) and dishonesty displayed on another occasion (e.g., in sports). Theoretically, however, traits are meant to predict behavioral tendencies rather than single instances of particular behaviors. If the single occasion of cheating in class was not a refl ection of a tendency, but rather refl ected a rare incident, then the study did not measure the trait of dishonesty in the fi rst place. Evidently, it is more diffi cult to predict a single behavior than aggregated behaviors (i.e., tendencies). It would be diffi cult to predict, for instance, whether a student will be sloppy with his homework, disorganized with his future goals, and often absent from his part-time job, just because he was late to class today. However, if the student was late to most classes (assuming no unavoidable reason existed), this prediction could be made with more con- fi dence. Thus, according to trait theory, to determine whether people behave consistently from one situation to another, the behavior in each situation must be measured not just once, but on a number of occasions.
Of course, such data are diffi cult of obtain. Thus, the above argument posed by trait theorists was generally regarded a theo- retical one. However, research carried out in the last decade has now also provided empirical backing for these claims. This line of research involves asking participants to report their current behavior, thoughts, and feelings multiple times a day for sev- eral days. This may include questions such as “During the past hour, how well does ‘talkative’ describe you?” Thus in addition to a standard personality questionnaire score indicating how extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, and so on a person is, researchers obtain how extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, and so on a person actually acts on average across various situ- ations and over an extended period of time. Thus, this provides
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clear data on how little or how much behavior actually varies from situation to situation and over time.
Fleeson and Gallagher (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of 15 studies employing such an impressive methodology. Their results showed that traits were strongly predictive of everyday trait manifestation in behavior, with correla- tions between .42 and .56. The authors’ conclusion was unambiguous:
The resulting correlations comfortably surpassed .30 and even .40. This evidence combined with the strong predictions of life outcomes (Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006) casts strong doubt on the contention that traits do not predict behavior or that they have a .30 to .40 ceiling. In fact, far from being irrelevant, traits appear to be necessary for a full understanding of behavior, given the large amount of variance in trait manifestation in behavior they predict. (p. 1109)
PERSONALITY DISORDERS:
WHEN OUR PERSONALITY IS ABNORMAL
In the previous sections, we talked about various theories of personality, including the dispositional paradigm, which states that there are quantitative differences or variability in the degree to which people display certain personality traits. However, our discussion focused on general or normal behavioral tenden- cies. A distinct fi eld of psychology that focuses on abnormal behaviors, namely psychopathology or abnormal psychology, also informs our understanding of personality, and shall be examined briefl y in this chapter. Given that psychopathology is a huge area of psychology, we shall focus primarily on the specifi c area of psychopathology that is most relevant in rela- tion to personality, namely, personality disorders. These refer to relatively pervasive maladaptive patterns of behavior, thought,
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