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A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

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Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#71

Post by mettamage »

anbende wrote: post #62
Wronnay wrote: post #28

I can't read a text based on the Big Five seriously. My personality changed in many ways over the years. It's kinda like your political position changes over the years. Someone fresh from college might be introverted and on the left political spectrum because he has no money, but to be successful he might get extroverted and when he has much money, he might get more on the right political spectrum. How can something…

Hi there, psychologist here who has done research in personality including looking at the Big Five. It's not my personal favorite set of constructs, but I have great respect for the body of work supporting it. Modern personality theory in no way assumes that personality doesn't change over time. It finds instead that personality tends to be "somewhat stable over time" which means that personality doesn't vary massive…

What do you think about psilocybin's effect on openness? Are there other studies that produce such marked changes in personality?

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#72

Post by lr4444lr »

austincheney wrote: post #45
maxqin1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whom? The real problem is that not all valuable paths can come to the same bottleneck. Med student? Well, the SAT might be a good indicator of how successful you'll be at completing a medical program in the US. Same thing for law. Are you the creative type? Then the SAT probably won't be as indicative of your future success.

I have around a 148 IQ but scored only 1060 on the SAT. Clearly those two measures are not linked. This has not prevented me from earning a 4 year degree or becoming a software developer. I find writing software to be easy while many of my peers seem to struggle. In reflection personality and practice are all that have mattered. IQ isn’t a significant consideration of comfort/confidence in writing software, a skill.

IQ strongly correlates with SAT score, IIRC. If you have a 148 IQ, I bet a capable tutor could train you to score a good deal higher than 1060.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#73

Post by paulpauper »

rkk3 wrote: post #61
paulpauper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligen... I look at it like this, for creative, intellectually demanding work IQ is a necessary but perhaps insufficient condition. You need to be smart to achieve success cause you are competing with other people, so smarter people will have an edge. Google is not hiring people with 90-110 iqs. So having a high IQ is needed to at least be sufficiently proficient…

Google hires no one within 1SD of the Avg IQ? This I find hard to believe.

for technical postitions, i am sure IQs cluser around 125-140

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#74

Post by pishpash »

Side note, maybe as technology removes barriers to access to resources that used to be gated by social graces, extroversion and agreeableness are changing in importance. In other words, in a world where machines outcompete humans, what used to be successful traits among humans aren't going to be always the fittest in the new environment.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#75

Post by paulpauper »

jollybean wrote: post #36
kijin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the same chart, conscientious people also seem to perform significantly better in college than everyone else. In the modern world, better GPAs are usually correlated with higher income. Interestingly, those people don't seem to do particularly well in the SAT. Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest only after they get into college and get a chance to make independent decisions.

Getting good grades is a grind. Being 'sufficiently smart' - plus - being organized, diligent, applying yourself consistently, will probably get you better grades than being a disorganized genius. If everyone had the same IQ, then University grades would be actually a really, really good measure of raw conscientiousness.

but some courses are easier than others though

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#76

Post by paulpauper »

austincheney wrote: post #45
maxqin1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whom? The real problem is that not all valuable paths can come to the same bottleneck. Med student? Well, the SAT might be a good indicator of how successful you'll be at completing a medical program in the US. Same thing for law. Are you the creative type? Then the SAT probably won't be as indicative of your future success.

I have around a 148 IQ but scored only 1060 on the SAT. Clearly those two measures are not linked. This has not prevented me from earning a 4 year degree or becoming a software developer. I find writing software to be easy while many of my peers seem to struggle. In reflection personality and practice are all that have mattered. IQ isn’t a significant consideration of comfort/confidence in writing software, a skill.

they are positively correlated. your outlier does not invalidate the relation between the variables.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#77

Post by [deleted] »

periheli0n wrote: post #41

Are these personality types really scientifically grounded? I once was sort of compelled to take a Myers-Briggs test and I found it utterly flawed. So much of one’s personality depends on the contact and environment, yet Myers-Briggs wants to force you into one type. Making things way too simple. But maybe simple is what was sought here rather than really resolving personality.

[deleted]

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#78

Post by periheli0n »

anbende wrote: post #56
periheli0n wrote: post #41

Are these personality types really scientifically grounded? I once was sort of compelled to take a Myers-Briggs test and I found it utterly flawed. So much of one’s personality depends on the contact and environment, yet Myers-Briggs wants to force you into one type. Making things way too simple. But maybe simple is what was sought here rather than really resolving personality.

That's a good question, and your reaction to the Myers-Briggs is justified! It is not evidence-based and is roundly rejected by modern personality psychology. The work the author of this piece was describing on the other-hand is one of the most well-researched phenomena in the history of psychology. It is based on a massive amount of research looking at clusters of personality adjectives found in dozens of languages…

Thank you for this deep answer, and for confirming my impression of Myers-Briggs!

I can see how a continuous scale can already fix a few issues. However, isn’t it still too simplistic to say “personality feature X correlates with real-life success measure Y?”

Take for example “Openness”. It’s not hard to imagine how the very same person can be very open with one group of people, but act totally differently in another group.

Is Openness then really a feature of personality? Or maybe rather a description of the social behaviour of one person in a specific context?

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#79

Post by emdubbelyou »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #59

I have a really hard time taking this kind of "analysis" seriously. It does not seems rigorous or scientific at all, and I don't understand how it can be visible here on HN, to be honest...

If you’re going to post a comment of skepticism, please try to support your argument with actual criticism. Currently, all I have is your opinion on the article, which is in contrast to the # of people who upvoted the post.

I can easily say that I DO think the article is rigorous and scientific but then we’d disagree without any insight into what we disagree on.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#80

Post by dr_dshiv »

jawns wrote: post #58
anbende wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true for a lot of common psychological constructs, the Big Five were not defined according to agreement or consensus. The definitions were driven by the lexical hypothesis whereby the wide variety of personality descriptive adjectives in human language were factor analyzed and found to cluster into 5 distinct factors. So this isn't tautological in the way that you've described, though it is certainly re…

But isn't that just tautology with an intermediate step? You might have Personality Descriptive Adjective X that is found to cluster into what we call a Big Five trait. But Adjective X has its own definition, and it's likely that the tautology (at least insofar as these life satisfaction correlations are concerned) happens at that level.

I suppose they asked 1000s of different questions, each representing a different personality characteristic. After factor analysis, some arbitrary number of factors were found to account for most of the variance. Why did they settle for 5 vs 8 vs 12?
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