Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dynomight.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 261 posts

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

#111

Post by periheli0n »

anbende wrote: post #93
periheli0n wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excellent—that sounds almost like a Bayesian approach, where personality corresponds to the prior, the context in which the person behaves is the likelihood, and the posterior is a distribution of behaviours.

I guess a personal goal should then be to seek the context in which one’s strengths match best the demands.

I would suggest an MCMC approach but I guess the evaluation of individual outcomes is too costly to make this practical ;)

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

#112

Post by fsloth »

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 pseudoscientific bs. The only reason it’s so famous is that it’s an easy snake oil to peddle by consultants.

It was literally concocted by two persons without scientific method or context. It’s fiction. Some fiction mirrors life quite well, but that does not turn it into a scientific tool.

The only time Myers-Briggs has some utility is as a facilitation tool when a consultant needs to convince a roomfull of people that diverse teams are good, and that cognitive diversity is an asset and what it might look like. I.e. it’s a usefull proxy for a scientific measure when we’ve been brainwashed to trust only high-modernist fantasies and have no space for actual humanist rumination.

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

#114

Post by analog31 »

anbende wrote: post #52
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…

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…

Given that the definitions of words and phrases are possibly subjective, I've often wondered if the personality test largely measures how people interpret the questions.

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

#115

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

kortex wrote: post #53
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.

Indeed. SAT is basically "how good are you at cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain and regurgitating it in a high pressure, timed scenario". That is a kind of intelligence, but there are very few occupations where that kind of intelligence is useful. Lawyers and doctors. Both the "intensely study something rather uninteresting" and "perform under high stress and time demand" are specif…

SAT is more "how good AND MOTIVATED are you at cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain"

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

#116

Post by planet-and-halo »

The book "Personality" by Nettle gives the best layman's summary of the Big 5 model I've found. What I particularly like about it, beyond the summary of each aspect, is the way he frames it in terms of evolution and why being on one end of the scale for a trait is not "better." Agreeableness is probably the easiest one to understand from an evolutionary perspective. If you worry a lot about other people's needs, you're more likely to make them happy and reap the benefits of reciprocity, but you're also less likely to directly pursue your own needs. So it goes with the other traits too: being on different parts of the spectrum come with advantages and disadvantages from a reproductive standpoint. Conscientiousness and Neuroticism are the two traits most correlated with financial success in the modern world, but they had downsides in an ancestral environment and even in our modern world can have negative effects e.g. on personal happiness and wellbeing.

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

#117

Post by saiya-jin »

austincheney wrote: post #64
maxqin1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have around a 148 That's rather impressive, but I would double-check those numbers. For example, which IQ test? Was it recently updated? IQ tests are adjusted by as many as 10 points every 10 years [1]. Have you double verified with another test? How did you prepare for each? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I am not that concerned. The number is as important to me as my exceedingly unimpressive SAT score.

well then it shouldn't be used as main point of your argument

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

#118

Post by mycologos »

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…

The author of the featured article has also written a defense of the Myers-Briggs system that argues against several of your points: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html

(I'm not particularly invested in either model, but it is somewhat cute that the author of both pieces is the same.)

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

#119

Post by wizzwizz4 »

periheli0n wrote: post #111
anbende wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Excellent—that sounds almost like a Bayesian approach, where personality corresponds to the prior, the context in which the person behaves is the likelihood, and the posterior is a distribution of behaviours. I guess a personal goal should then be to seek the context in which one’s strengths match best the demands. I would suggest an MCMC approach but I guess the evaluation of individual outcomes is too costly to mak…

I think it's more “a personality is a function over the continuous domain of situations”.

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

#120

Post by analog31 »

hansvm wrote: post #60
mathrando wrote: post #43

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?

Is it ethical to give the "right" answer to a regular interview question? An interview might be a stressful situation for some people, who often suffer from a bias of downgrading themselves compared to others. So a calibrated interpretation of the questions may be necessary to provide a faithful result in the first place.
Post reply on HN