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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

#91

Post by danaris »

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.

The Big 5 Personality Inventory is pretty much the gold standard in the field of psychology. The traits it measures are reasonably (though not completely) stable over a person's lifetime, have decent predictive power, and have been tested and studied rigorously for decades now. They have nearly nothing in common with Meyers-Briggs.

In particular, each of the traits is measured on a separate spectrum—none of them are treated as binary the way M-B does, and they don't seek to pigeonhole you based on your levels of the different traits into some oversimplified bucket.

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

#92

Post by austincheney »

lr4444lr wrote: post #72
austincheney wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A good tutor and sufficient preparation time should be enough to transform anybody into an SAT expert. If that is the case and this indicates a person with low IQ can score high on the test then potentially everybody is potentially an outlier, which then isn’t an outlier at all.

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

#93

Post by anbende »

periheli0n wrote: post #78
anbende wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

This is a great question! And it touches on what's call the "person-situation" debate, first popularized by Walter Michel[1]. Essentially there was a major debate about whether traits were a thing or we should just be focused on context-specific behavior. Mischel believed that traits weren't useful, and situations ruled.

In many ways this debate has been resolved by the "person as a density distribution" [2]. People do vary a lot within, and that variation is vitally important. However, their average or "set point" upon which they vary is also important and predictive.

When we talk about the correlation between a trait and some external marker, we are only looking at correlations with averages or set-points, which as you mention is only a limited picture of that person, but it is still useful and valuable to look at. For example, I'm a fairly open person. This means that on average I'm more open in more situations. And this is predictive. It's also important to note that this only loosely predicts what I'll do in any particular situation or at any particular timepoint.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person%E2%80%93situation_debat...

[2] https://personality-project.org/revelle/syllabi/classreading...

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

#94

Post by infogulch »

HPsquared wrote: post #25
jawns wrote: 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…

My (lay) understanding is that personality data tend to be clustered such that it's best explained by five factors, with the names of the factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, etc.) having been added later.

Wikipedia states it pretty well, "When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person." [1]

The Big Five are a statistically-derived groupings of phrases that are reasonably stable when measured from different angles. I think it would be fair to call it a "modest initial result" if compared to the physical sciences, or "wildly successful" if compared to basically anything prior that came out of the social sciences. There are some quite reasonable critiques listed on the wikipedia page, such as a lack of modeling theory, or only accounting for a portion of personality differences, or arguments for a slightly different number of factors, etc. That said, it seems to be one of the first actually solid findings that ever came out of the social sciences. It's like the whole field has been flailing around, swept down a river in the dark, and for the first time we found a stone that has a bit of purchase, even if it's covered with moss and slippery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

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

#95

Post by minikites »

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.

Myers-Briggs is astrology for office workers. You can read anything into it, helpful or unhelpful.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #83
austincheney wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by stephc_int13 »

emdubbelyou wrote: post #79
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.

I did that on purpose, simply to voice my opinion.

Let's say I vote to see less article like this one on HN.

This is merely annoying, not enough to warrant a full debunk.

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

#98

Post by namenotrequired »

periheli0n wrote: post #78
anbende wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Take for example “Openness”. It’s not hard to imagine how the very same person can be very open with one group of people

Lest this be misunderstood, note that "Openness" in this context is not about being honest. It is short for "Openness to Experience". Roughly, it's about creativity and curiosity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience

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

#99

Post by justbored123 »

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 is a problem of interpretation by amateurs more than a problem with the test itself. Myers-Briggs gives you PERCENTAGES of every trait, then it uses 4 letter labels to make things simpler for people, but you are supposed to understand that a person that scored 49% introvert in the introvert-extrovert spectrum is going to be far similar to a person that scored extrovert with 51% than to a person that scored introvert 10% because its a spectrum not an absolute value.

That is the reason that modern tests like Big Five did away with the labels, because people were incapable to reason beyond them and kept making dumb assumptions like "He scored introvert so he must hate parties or I scored introvert the first time but extrovert the second (a potential 1% difference between the labels without the percentages associated to them) so the test is crap".

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

#100

Post by vlovich123 »

anbende wrote: post #89
vlovich123 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My analogy to humorism was not to imply that there’s no empirical evidence at all here. Just that the field of psychology has continually struggled to actually develop testable hypotheses that lead to scientific theories.

There’s a giant chasm between “I have a signal” and “here’s what that signal means”. You can’t start out with a data set, pick out some signals and then say what they mean. That’s scientific theory 101. You build a hypothetical model and then design experiments to test those theories. It’s not me doing the field a disservice. The practitioners have consistently and repeatedly done bad science and statistics. I’ll be more supportive once the field actually starts producing falsifiable theories that are supported by evidence and the practitioners are better at calling out their peers.

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