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

dynomight.net

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

#81
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Articles like this answer the question, "what if 1920s eugenicists got hold of 1980s magazine relationship tests?" The scary thing is a lot of commercial "people analytics" systems marketed to HR departments, lenders, and government agencies are little more than dressed up relationship tests from 1980s magazines. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snake...

If you know the tests are snake oil, is it ethical to give the "right" answers to get a job?

I would say yes, but do you want the job at the place that is giving you snake oil?

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

#82
post #58
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.

Tautology implies that the definition we give is redundant, but none of these things were defined in this way. This is because none of the research relies on this kind of dictionary definition.

Instead, they literally ask people hundreds of questions of the type:

"To what extent would you consider yourself to be [adjective]?" (0 - 'not at all' to 5 - 'complete')

Then they factor analyze the results to see which adjectives tend to be highly related to each other. Factor analysis builds on correlation to find shared variation among large groups of indicator variables.

So it is related to how people think of the adjectives and what they mean, but it is not the case that we are just lumping definitions together or "saying the same thing in different words" in the way of a tautology. Instead, what we're saying is that "Most of these personality adjectives mostly mean the same thing. Here's the thing they all mostly mean. If humans in all languages have tons of words that mostly mean this common thing, maybe this common thing is significant and worthy of study."

Regarding life satisfaction, the sense that one finds their life satisfactory and "would change nothing" (one of the items in the Satisfaction with Life Scale that was most likely used to measure it) doesn't show up in those other traits in any major way. In fact, to the extent that a description of the self is related to a world-view, belief or other external factor, it will never be a tautology, because a self-view and other-view or world-view will never share a common definition or tautology by virtue of the self-other distinction.

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

#83
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.

SAT and IQ are strongly correlated, you are an outlier.

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

#85
post #52
post #20

I think a lot of this analysis is tautological -- meaning that when you boil it down, you're just saying that things are as you have defined them to be. For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition. If that measurement includes questions such…

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…

Humorism was a field of academic study for two millennia before germ theory demonstrated how laughable the entire field was. It’s always important to remember that doing research in a field doesn’t necessarily mean that the field itself is on a solid foundation that maps to reality. Psychology and psychiatry really do struggle to demonstrate statistically meaningful results behind most therapies (CBT is perhaps a notable exception, although even there results can be mixed). Analyses like the big 5 are squarely in the “let me read your tea leaves” camp of “science” IMO. They basically play a trick of “sure, the other personality theories were bogus but this time we did stumble upon a good way of characterizing it” while taking at face value that the entire endeavor as valid. Neuroscience has a bit more behind it because it’s actually rooted in quantifiable measurements somewhat and even there it’s difficult. It’s like trying to reverse-engineer a modern CPU from X-ray lithography. If you know the theory underpinning everything, you can start to make educated guesses. Without that you’re not going to get anywhere close to what’s going on let alone root cause if something is broken.

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

#86

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.

See [1]. It's a lot, I don't fully understand it myself. I find it convincing enough to say it's scientifically grounded, in the linguistic sense at least. I wouldn't say this research is grounded in the biological sense (not the five factor model anyway, perhaps the concept of "personality" is though). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Hi...

Thanks for the link. So if I read this correctly, these personality traits refer to how one is perceived by others. OK, I guess that makes sense.

But it would be total nonsense to conclude about personality traits from a self-taken test.

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

#87

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.

it's claimed that myers-briggs is reliably repeatable, but my personal experience contradicts this, with a flip-flopping of 3 of the 4 attributes over time. it doesn't seem too reliable to me.

Yes, my experience exactly. I could imagine myself in different situations suiting different answers, and therefore having different personalities.

That might even make sense but then it’s not a description of personality, but of context-dependent behaviour. Only useful within a defined context.

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

#89
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…

Humorism was a field of academic study for two millennia before germ theory demonstrated how laughable the entire field was. It’s always important to remember that doing research in a field doesn’t necessarily mean that the field itself is on a solid foundation that maps to reality. Psychology and psychiatry really do struggle to demonstrate statistically meaningful results behind most therapies (CBT is perhaps a not…

A major problem with humorism was that it did not have any empirical evidence to support it.

Modern personality theory DOES. Personality theory uses a variety of techniques to show that a construct is internally consistent and related to real-world indicators. If independent people can view a video or a person and they reliably rate that entity similarly (inter-rater reliability), we can say with some certainty that there is something there. Relating a construct like this to a variety of real-world outcomes allows us to ascertain its relationship to the world. This evidence is messy and not nearly as solid as what's found in the harder sciences, but your dismissal of the modern statistics of questionnaire-based measurement does a very well-researched field of inquiry a huge disservice.

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

#90
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just amazed that we’re still happy to condense one of the most complex phenomena, if not *the* most complex phenomenon that we were aware of into a single scalar performance value.

It seems a convenient shorthand. Intelligence is surely a multi-dimensional vector, but it’s convenient in a lot of circumstances to talk about its magnitude. “All models are wrong; some models are useful.”

> Intelligence is surely a multi-dimensional vector

There's a single component responsible for almost half of the difference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

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